


The Dust Rises Up

by MorriganFearn



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Cyberpunk, Mild Gore, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 23:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2044443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorriganFearn/pseuds/MorriganFearn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magvel was weathering the cyberpunk dystopia rather well when the creeping cables of the net began to actively attack organic life once more. A group of heroes banded together and traveled to the heart of the mess, the disruptor city of Grado.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Spreading Net

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Raphiael](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raphiael/gifts).



> Written for Nagamas-in-July 2014, for Raphi who prompted: Kyle/Ephraim - loyalty and vows, the conflict between roles and relationships. Not that this turned out to be anything like that, but that's where the idea came from.

Saleh's expression on seeing the border of Caer Pelyn was almost funny, if abject unhappiness that caused even the curls of his hair to droop counted as funny. It did not. Knoll measured the extent of the damage with a tired eye. This time last year, the bundles of cables snaking their way through the dust and ash that was the harbinger of dead zone expansion had been at least a kilometer away. He knew, as last year he had collapsed in the shade of the rotting tree, thinking it was probably fine to die now that he was a kilometer away from the dead zone, and his body would be gone before the snaking tendrils of cablular expansion reached his final resting place.

Myrrh's stance by Saleh's side was firm. Given that she was inorganic, she would be in the least danger on their journey, but Knoll wondered if she still felt fear, having calculated the possibilities of the dead zone realizing that she was not just another beam or girder that moved too often to become a support structure for the network spidering its way from the latest active core, and integrating with her systems. If this sudden expansion had the source Knoll knew it did, they would be traveling for a long time, deep into the heart of the territory claimed by the living cities. And the chance of Myrrh's integration with one of the city systems grew ever greater the longer she wandered their wastes.

“It has grown bigger, hasn't it?” Myrrh asked.

“Much,” Saleh marveled. “And they're all coming from the south.”

As he traced the routes of the cables back along their advance, to the horizon point with a slender finger, Knoll couldn't help observing that given Caer Pelyn's general geographical location, almost any active core would be sending out its deadly emissaries from the south.

Myrrh gave him a look. “Or the east.”

Knoll shuddered. “Yes, we have to go south.”

“Will you be all right?” the robot asked, reminding him of the central intelligence of Grado's clear zone. Myrrh's sentences were better put together, and she might even actually feel concern. Her programming was fascinating. Disconcerting, but quite fascinating. Luckily for Knoll her presence and personality were just restful.

Saleh looked over his shoulder once more, perhaps seeing the village through the rising mist. After so many years hunched over computer screens in darkened rooms Knoll's own eyes couldn't make out anything more than the soft golds and pinks of the sunrise reflecting off the mist at that distance, much less the small dash of copper and blue he suspected that Saleh was dreading to see following them.

Turning back to the party, Saleh cleared his throat, possibly embarrassed, though with Saleh it was always hard to tell. “Dara has him well in hand, then. Good. Let's head south. Though it does look as though we will have to turn southwest, in the end.”

They both glanced at Knoll again. He just smiled, and adjusted his goggles over the puffy skin around his eyes that he had earned through too much worrying about this moment instead of sensible sleeping. “Well, there would not be much use in my tagging along as guide if we had to go in any other direction. Shall we?”

They stepped into dust of the advancing dead zone.


	2. The Dangerous Border

The term dead zone was a misnomer, even in Jehanna where the first demon core at Lagdou had finished its grisly growth cycle and shut down, having destroyed most of the ecosystem and left a desert behind. There was still life in a desert after all. It just had to adapt to the conditions.

Forde smiled at the spiny lizard that ran over his knuckles excitedly, so surprised to have found something that radiated heat in the frozen night at the edge of Grado's dead zone. He held the new lizard friend's precarious perch of his arm out to Kyle, who made a disgusted noise. “Put that down. It's probably poisonous.”

“That doesn't matter as long as he isn't interested in poisoning me. But come on, isn't this the best piece of news?”

“Your idea of good news is that you can make friends with possibly poisonous reptiles instead of keeping on the look out for the ripper that we were tracking?” the dead pan delivery made Forde want to plead ignorance in that special way that made Kyle's hands twitch. The muscles under his left eye had a tendency to jump, too, but in full dust goggles, with their night vision lenses in place, none of Kyle's other little expressions would be visible.

Still, that was not the reason he had picked up the lizard. Forde let his arm slowly down until it was level with the drifts of cooling sand. “There's organic matter this close to Grado's border. Even if a bunch of rippers, flesh flayers, and robocinerators are shuffling over the border, the cables can't get through the sand and dust of the desert to dig into anything sleeping.”

The lizard scuttled off, deciding that it would not be a pioneer in post-feather reptilian aviation.

Ephraim's voice on their radios hissed through the mysterious static endemic to communication in Jehanna. “Are you two in position yet? I've found the ripper, and he's got an armature friend. It looks like it used to be a piece of farm equipment. Maybe a threshing machine.”

Kyle groaned, and began shuffling through the sand toward the red dot of Ephraim's locator position. Forde turned on the topographical map over the display on his own goggles. It looked like a depression of some kind. Probably one of the old stream beds. That was pretty good. Their quarry should be ripe for ambush. Armatures weren't too bad to take out, once you found the miniature core that had been left by the core tendrils to power a machine that had never been intended to move without human supervision. Rippers had more staying power—the dying flesh of the person they had once been could take more damage, and cores could be hidden in the strangest places beneath muscle, circuitry, wires, and bone—but generally couldn't move fast enough to deliver any infection, unlike an armature.

They slid and slithered over the dunes, but the ground firmed up beneath their feet soon enough, and a cut in the earth appeared, definitely an old stream bed. Ephraim's location jumped suddenly from their side of the stream bed to the center, much further west, almost at Grado's border. Forde heard Kyle curse the entire desert for the communications blips that it imposed, and flip on his radio again. There was a lot of yelling crackle on the other side.

Both guards looked at each other, and activated their disruptor staves. Kyle jumped to the other side of the narrow bed, and they both raced towards the dot. Sand slipped under their not precisely desert sound boots, and pebbles bounced away from them, telling Forde with their disappearing sound that the bone dry trace of former water was deepening, even as the distance between him and Kyle grew wider.

The meters from the true border clashing noise filled the night air. Shadows danced green and black through their goggles. Forde jumped to the stream bed first, glad that it was less than a meter away. The shock of impact still jarred his feet, but he was running towards Ephraim again, the blazing white arc of the disruptor against green telling Forde all he needed to know, even if it blotted out any other information the night goggles could give him. Kyle would run on ahead and circle back around in a pincher movement. Forde could trust that.

The armature was massive enough that the bulk of it's swinging scythes and disastrous moving parts blocked all view of Ephraim and the disruptor as soon as it wheeled across Forde's line of vision. He pulled the goggles down to his neck, and stabbed at the freakish machine, trying to find its power source amid the tangles of dripping wires. All he had to do was get the disruptor close to the core.

A pinwheel of wire the had been detached from its rotator as part of some ineffable new design for this thing tore up Forde's leg as though his clothing and skin was loose hay that needed to be scooped into neat piles. He didn't even scream, but something was screaming, inhuman and high as Forde lunged forward, burying the cutting end of the disruptor staff in a mess of cables by giant screw of sharp blades that once ate nothing more personal than wheat.

In a bright arc, from the other side of the machine, a second cutting end lanced in, and they sparked off each other, lightning arching between the tips just before the whole armature exploded flinging both combatants back. Forde landed against the lip of the former bank, and his teeth clacked shut against his cheek. The screaming stopped, leaving Forde to realize in a dazed way that that high harsh sound had actually come out of him.

Kyle's own yell rent the night, and something thudded and whudded before finally collapsing with a sigh. Forde pushed himself upright. If Kyle had taken out the ripper that meant Ephraim had been the one to initiate the disruptor charge. Oh shit. His injured leg nearly buckled as he fought to stand, and run to the small shadow further on in the defile.

The ripper was still groaning, grabbing at Kyle's booted feet as Forde limped past. There was a horrifying squelch behind him, and Forde guessed Kyle had shoved the staff directly into the creature's skull. Ephraim was struggling to sit up in about five centimeters of slimy mud. In the weak starlight Forde guessed the extent of the damage was that Ephraim had lost his goggles, and his leather protective armor was a mess. Forde held out a hand, which was when he saw a small green glow in Ephraim's side, where the leather had been completely blackened.

“Kyle!”

Forde knelt stiffly in the mud and reached out, ignoring the way Ephraim batted at his hand and muttered, “It's a small cut. Let's pack some mud on it and call it a night.”

“ _Kyle_!” Forde's gloves came away with something sticky on them. Please let it be mud. He tore off the glove, and reached for Ephraim's side again. Warm and living blood stuck to the leather, making it almost black in the night time shadows. Just above that however, Forde's fingers found warm flesh and then blood sticky metal. Something slithered behind Ephraim, even as Forde turned, desperately wanting Kyle to stop bashing the ripper to bits, and help him get Ephraim up right. “Ephraim's infect—”

Kyle was shoving the clawing remains of the ripper from his side, battling with a flaying decaying arm. His face had gone the color of milk in the starlight, however, and he was staring right at them as he tried to tear himself away from the clutching flesh and cables.

“Forde! You're both _in_ Grado! _GET OUT!_ ”

The slithering suddenly was no longer a desert snake going about its business. A bundle of cables reared from the muck, spearing into Ephraim like a rag doll, and slamming Forde sideways. Agony laced through his calf as something stabbed into the caking wound there.

Kyle appeared, his staff whirling in cutting arcs, sliding the tendrils that had embedded into Ford's leg, and then whirling to pulverize the sapling thick bundle growing from Ephraim's side. Kyle scraped and slammed the cutting end down six times as Forde regained his legs, and grabbed his friend's arms. He pulled Ephraim through the mud onto cracked earth and dust just as a snap indicated that the cable finally broke under Kyle's onslaught.

The three young men stared, white faced, as the end of the cable potentially filled with a core ready to be deposited wriggled grimly from Ephraim's side. Kyle moved first, scooping Ephraim up. “I'm sorry, my lord, this is going to hurt. A lot. Forde, please say you have a flashlight.”

Forde reached for his belt and the comforting weight there. Switching it on, he tried to ignore the moment of the cable ends as they fastened on the flesh around his own wound. He tried to ignore the squish as Kyle dug his fingers around the clamps on Ephraim's side, and squeezed, popping the infection channel at the end of the cable closed. Green oozed phosphorescently around Kyle's fingers, and Forde really tried to ignore that. Ephraim's shriek as Kyle yanked the cable end off told Forde just how unsuccessful he had been at ignoring anything that had happened in the last five seconds.

“Forde next,” Ephraim breathed hard. “We need him walking if we're going to cross the border tomorrow.

Kyle's hand shook as he tossed the cable away. Instead of moving on to Forde, the shivering hand returned to trace up the opening in Ephraim's armor and the black line of metal growing around a small glowing green bead of a seed core implanted in the cut he had received earlier.

“You've been infected, we have to get you to—”

“The only place they know how to cure the infection, rather than just stop it, is a few meters away,” Ephraim reached up, grabbing Kyle by the dirty neck of the shirt hiding under the armor. “Now. Help. Forde. I'm not going to have _two_ of us possibly turning into rippers.”

In the harsh light of the flashlight, the sudden tightness of Kyle's face was carved in thin black shadow around his mouth and eyes. Forde tried to laugh, but it rang hollowly across the deserted rocks and sands.


	3. Joining Allies

Eirika had never really realized what it meant to live inside the dead zone. She hadn't mocked the farmers of the living zone in the north the way her brother once did, but she had always thought she was better equipped and more self sufficient than she was turning out to be. Her life had happened within the disruption bubble of Renais, and the network of small safe zones and roads that surrounded the tamed core. She had known monsters on the streets, but she had never imagined that things like walls or fire hydrants could actively destroy the plant life any wandering cybernetic monster would have ignored.

Now, though, she was out of the disruptor zone, mapping the devastation of the new wave of core monsters, and the reach of the cabling net on her father's orders. Most people out here, without disruptors that nullified the nets, and made the monsters slow, made do with what they had, and what needed to be made. There were builders out here in Renais territory, and teachers, and electricians and warriors, and they all made it work. Eirika wished she had known them before today. She wished she had thanked them for their bravery, trying to reclaim pockets and unearth ruined cities. One day, she would be responsible for growing the food these people ate, and maintaining the networks that got it to them, and never before had she felt so unequal to that task, or the desperate need to rise to its challenge.

The road network had been the first to go. It always was, according to her father. The expanses were too great between the relative safe zones of the big disruptors, and the number of people to patrol against the onslaught of cabling and monsters were too few to maintain an effective watch if a rogue core came on line, or a Tame core went rogue and started trying to duplicate itself in everything that moved.

Eirika had been up and down every major road system north in the past year, repairing what she could, helping to fight, if she couldn't. It seemed awful that the skills Ephraim had taught her were the only thing that she really had to offer these courageous people who knew so much more about fixing the broken world they shared than she, a disruptor Lady, did.

The North, the reclaimed, proud, tamed and living North had looked like a disaster zone. Dust rolled in waves over areas that had forgotten that silty gray and purple powder was the herald of the net reaching for new land. Eirika had met Innes setting up the exact same kind of temporary jammers everyone in the dead zones used in a grid that had managed to halt the advance. For a while.

He was so tired, he even scowled at her when she arrived with her surveyor's equipment and Seth and Franz in tow. “ _How_ did you get here? We lost the South Twist Road just short of Mulan a few weeks ago. And none of the other roads short of the Bay of Grief have been safe for months.”

“I'm surveying the damage from our territory,” Eirika waved her notebook. Innes stared at it blankly. Oh no, he was swaying. When had he last slept? Well, even if he was half asleep, Innes still appreciated a solid report. “We've gotten the Twist cleared of monsters at least. The cables are growing everywhere, but they seem to be dormant now. No attacks in the night or anything.”

“Hah, so these are working,” Innes gave the field jammer an encouraging pat, before frowning again. “When did you come up?”

“We've been clearing the Twist for the better part of the week. Innes, you look exhausted. Should we sit down?”

“I'm fine, Eirika. Anyway, this is—I honestly don't know what to call it here. It should be safe, but honestly, you had better head toward Frelia's disruptor zone. That's the only truly safe area until Valni. Tana will take you and your escorts. We'll make sure you go back to Renais fully provisioned, of course. And with better escort—”

Eirika felt Innes grip her elbow, politely about to guide her in whatever direction his plans were pointing him. She side stepped. “No, Innes. I can't stay. You need to know: the cabling on the Twist Road, the new stuff, is banded with Grado's colors, as well as Renais blue. Seth thinks, and I agree, one of the lesser cores in Grado has gone rogue and met up with one of ours. It might be the one at Renvall or any one of the border cores. Grado's wall of silence is good, but it's so old there could be a breakdown somewhere, and the citizens wouldn't know that a core was undefended until after something got to it, and returned the core to the dead zone. I owe it to my father to get this survey done quickly, and I have to go south to find the bad one on our end, and give my report to the border patrol at Grado, too.”

A thunderous look crossed Innes' face. Eirika wanted to smile. She remembered the seeds of that frustration with the world when Ephraim had won something and Innes was sulking. Those wonderful days when Frelia was a safe week end journey away seemed so long ago. Travel to Grado, at least, was supposed to be a little more difficult just because of the terrain. She wouldn't notice how long it took, hopefully.

Internal war waged, and decision made, Innes smoothed out his expression, trying to look as though he had not just been recalculating his plans and annoyed by it. “Very well. Thank you for the information, Eirika. But if that is true, and all of this activity is the result of two rogue cores, I want someone from Frelia to join your work.”

“No need—”

“Eirika! Tame cores only get infected when everyone who is supposed to be protecting the core is dead! Please, think about that.”

She had seen campsites that had been attacked by rippers and robocinerators. It seemed easy to talk about being brave under the sunny sky, but shells of human habitation with nothing left echoed to her from the past. The lonely quietness of those places had been horrible. “Thank you so much for your consideration, Innes. Are you sure you can spare anyone?”

“Of course he can,” Eirika turned just in time to get tackled by Tana, who hugged her around the waist, her flight helmet and the goggles strapped on top bumping into Eirika's chin. “He wouldn't have offered to have me escort you to Frelia if he couldn't spare me. I'll just take a two seater, instead of one of the cargo planes. That way, if you get into trouble, there are some options about escape. I'm so glad to see you!”

“Tana, going home is one thing,” Innes began, looking more than a little irritated. “Going into a dead zone, one we are almost certain is controlled by a near rogue, is another. You can't go. I'll send Vanessa.”

“Of course I can go!” in the rare times when Tana chose to scowl, the very slight family resemblance between the siblings became apparent. “You don't even need me to move supplies any more. Until the next shipment comes in, we're all twiddling our thumbs while you run back and forth inspecting your expansion rates and measuring all those big important numbers. There is nothing for any of us grunt workers to do, while you run this experiment, and you have more than enough people to run the cargo planes when your next batch of jammers is ready.”

“It. Is. Dangerous.”

“So is this! The only difference here is that you have loads of people to keep an eye on you. Eirika only has Seth and Franz. Do you really think for one moment that when I know one of my friends is going into danger I'm not going to be following right after her?”

In the end, Innes had lost. Maybe if their father had been there to weigh in, the result would have been different, though Eirika privately doubted that any decision that Tana strongly disagreed with would be kept for long. It was a foregone conclusion, really, Eirika knew, just as she always lost when trying to convince Ephraim not to go through with whatever plan that would inevitably make their father gain more gray hairs. That had probably been why the three years in Grado had done such wonders for him: Keeper Duessel's hair was already gray, and it would take a lot more than Ephraim to speed up the process. In deference to her older brother's worry, however, Tana had asked for Vanessa to accompany both of them, even if it meant refueling more often.

Frelia's planes were a wonder. Eirika thought they were armatures, originally, made with a seed core from Frelia's tamed core, but Tana explained that they were something else entirely. Yes, a seed core was needed, and Frelia used their tamed core in the production of their planes, but they weren't made like armatures—machine frames that had been overwhelmed by cables, until a kind of muscle-like system formed—they were planes made of whole parts, designed to take a seed core from the beginning, their computers all programmed with a glitch that prevented program override from any cores, which had them acting independently.

“Grado's Wyvern line is made in the same way,” Tana said to Eirika as they climbed into the clouds to avoid a crumbling tower, and then zoomed down so that Eirika could map the extent of the purple lined cables.

It made so much sense, seeing the net from above, though Eirika suspected that Tana was showing off her piloting skills just a bit. That was alright. Perhaps a steep dive might make Eirika's stomach drop into her boots, but with Tana's laughter in her ears, and the spectacular world spread out below it felt as though her heart, at least, was soaring.

“They're all based on the same group of planes that were caught during the first demon core outbreak, if I'm remembering properly,” Tana continued her history lesson. “We'll have to ask Vanessa, but I think an airport in Jehanna, or a manufactory, or something was caught in the net and all of the planes had core seeds implanted in their systems. But when the seed managed to create the pathways to the nav system something went wrong, or some glitch was created and you had seed powered things acting under their own volition, basically. No commands from the demon core to multiply and strip life from organics. It's a pity Renais doesn't have a lot of manufacturing hubs. These are really useful.”

Eirika thought of the people she had met over the last few months, and the amazing things they had created to survive, and the amazing things they had created to have fun, and smiled to herself. “A lot of the people in our zone of production have made things that can fly or do what needs to be done with rubber bands and old duct work. It would be nice, of course, if we had an air fleet like Frelia, but I like being able to eat tomatoes.”

“Oh no, why did you talk about food?” Tana groaned, sheering lower. “I want, ooh, haddock and garlic. With real butter. Can you imagine? Real butter.”

“Gradoan almonds,” Eirika shot back, and was unsurprised at the cry of pained jealousy. “With salt and herbs in oil.”

Tana, apparently capable of piloting with her feet as far as Eirika could see, actually turned around in the pilot's chair and stuck out her tongue. “It is so unfair! So unfair that you and Ephraim have been allowed to go to the south for school. They have everything down there.”

They did. Or well, they did, if you ignored the constant tension in the air as the tireless engineers tried to build the next great invention that would save the world from the dependance and terror of the cores. Even in lessons with children who laughed, openly, at Ephraim's stated ambition to become a dead zone protector, there had been something of their parents' worries that floated on the air. Lyon had once told her he was certain the real curse of living in the disruptor zones, supposedly clearing them to make way for the living zones once again, was not the knowledge that you were trying to rebuild on top of the cores that could go beyond rogue, all the way up to the organic inimical demon setting, but the knowledge that you were never going to be smart enough to inherit that burden.

Maybe that was what their father had wanted them to learn, sending them to the rich south where the mask of civilization was paper thin and cracking. Eirika didn't think so, though. Her father was not, well, that cynical.

“Eirika?”

Tearing herself away from thoughts that were just a little over dramatic and definitely part of her poetry writing days, Eirika happened to look over the wing for a distraction. “Tana, there's a small group of travelers over there. One of them looks very young. Can we land? I'd like to see what I can do for them. We're getting too close to the Grado border to tell them to shelter in the Renais disruptor zone. Particularly if Renvall is the rogue core.”

“Sure. It will give me time to see about refueling sites, and Franz and Seth can catch up. SkyRider Two, this is RainbowUnicorn. Eirika wants to land, and see about those people down there. Do you see any net activity, SkyRider?”

“Not in your area. Seth thinks he's found hints of the rogue core on our side, though. He wants to investigate.”

As Vanessa’s voice came in through the speaker, Eirika knew something was wrong with the small group below their position. The little girl stopped too often to look at the dormant cables. No child would be allowed to do that, for fear the cables might awaken. This was the dead zone, after all.

“We had better join you, then—”

“Tana, you're down to a quarter tank of fuel. You have to survey the area—wait. Tana, take a wide loop, on your wing tip if you have to. What do you see on the ground?”

“Well, a party of wanderers, and some of the old buildings around this place. Um, the road is a few kilometers over there, but, um, I guess it's been about as cabled as the buildings at this point. Uh, I think I can see a guard shack allllll the way to the west, so that's probably an indication of the border.”

“Think like a scout, Tana. What are the colors telling you?”

“Oh!”

“Tana,” Eirika found her fingers gripping the back of the pilot's chair so tightly that the plastic felt sharp against her skin. “What does 'Oh!' mean?”

Tana glanced at her, and the wheeling turn became sharper, angling the view over the wing into a near panorama of the ground. “SkyRider, I see both Renais blue and Grado purple coming from the south.”

“So do I, and we're much closer to the border than you are. Whatever rogue core has Renais tagged cabling work coming from it, it's from the other side of the border.”

“Or on the border,” Seth's voice at third hand through Vanessa's radio sounded tinny and Eirika wanted to laugh despite the situation. “I think it's Serafew. Both Renais and Grado builders worked on developing the safe disruptor zone there.”

The speaker crackled with Vanessa's clearer voice. “We need to scout. Tana, you need to set down and look for fuel. Eirika, I'll come and get you if we need you, but I need your communicant open and transmitting your signal. If we need to fall back, I want to know where to fall back to, understood?”

“But Serafew controls the Southern Highway. If that has been taken,” Eirika trailed off. “Tana, tell Vanessa not to get too close, alright? Seth and Franz will be wary, but there's never been a project as big as the Serafew disruptor up north.”

“Rainbow Unicorn to SkyRider Two, Eirika says be careful. Serafew's disruptor is really large, so when in doubt, hang back and stay safe.”

Vanessa chuckled. “As though _I'm_ the one who needs to be told that. Look for fuel, you two, and stay safe yourselves. SkyRider out.”

They spiraled to the earth, landing bumpily on what might have been a plaza once. The fountain that would have been giving out public drinking water in Grado, and shut down in Renais, but left to look pretty, was now a seething mass of cables, stretching out to the ruined beams and pillars of some building that had once stood here.

Eirika brought out her survey equipment: the notebook, the cold energy communicant, and her dust goggles. Tana wiped her eyes as she looked around, before pulling down her flight goggles and snapping them around her face. “One thing I didn't suspect was that I was going to have to be keeping these things on all day. I wish I'd thought to bring something else.”

“Are you still having trouble with _Achaeus_ turning on the information on them at random moments?”

“Well, not really. I've figured out that as long as I keep one piece of information on, his worry wart system doesn't try to turn everything on. So, as long as nothing tries to come at me from the right while being shaped like the altitude meter, I'm good.”

“That doesn't really sound good to me,” Eirika pointed out tentatively. “Everything looks quiet here, but that can be deceptive.”

Tana glanced toward the fountain once more, and then got out her communicant as well. “I know—I guess, well, I know I've never really been out of the Frelia disruptor zone before now, and it's hard to see the dangers here from the air, anyway. Even with all of the activity of the new nets and the cables, it's very safe in Frelia, and I guess I carry that feeling of safety everywhere. Particularly when I'm with you, and you're always so calm and ready to deal with these things. It makes me feel invincible, you know?”

“You make me pretty invincible, yourself,” Eirika felt a little pleased, and more than a little embarrassed by the praise, as she searched for any live cables in the immediate area. Everything was dormant. Not just in the square—whose destruction might have been caused centuries ago, and then the cables had been left over after the demon core in the Darkling Woods had been shut down—but all around the area. It was as though they were in the middle of a disruptor zone.

“Tana, do you think any of this is live?”

“No, but that's good. We'll have more time to cut a cable open for fuel, and get out of here before any others awaken and try to infect us.”

Eirika began walking around the base of the fountain, staring around. The group of travelers she had spotted from the air hadn't been concerned about the cables springing out of dormancy, either. What was it about this place that could be acting like a disruptor? Was there a full core here? Would it dampen everything enough that they could get their fuel without even waking the rogue cables? Could it be possible, with Serafew so close, that the rogue cables hadn't re-integrated with the centuries old cabling left here to rot?

Dust swirled underfoot, and Eirika saw a tree shoving up through the flags of the plaza that had been swarmed by cables, some of them banded in Grado's purple tag. No. This area must have been filled with plant growth over the original demon core wreckage, and only recently had that organic matter been re-consumed.

She walked toward the tree, one hand at the disruptor baton at her side, ready to turn and run at the slightest sign of active netting. Her communicant should be beeping a warning. Two figures moved around the dead ensnared tree. One had their head uncovered, displaying wavy curls that could have come from anywhere west of the desert. The rest of the person's body was shrouded in a cloak clearly intended to ward off dust, and possibly deter the more territorial people of the dead zone from demanding personal possessions, but they did not wear gloves, and were running bare fingers over the flexible rubber coating of the cables and the bark of the tree.

The sight was so extraordinary that Eirika almost didn't register the deep blue technician's robe sidling back as she started forward. “Hello!”

The person at the tree turned, revealing, as Eirika crossed the sunny plaza, serious, masculine face. He nodded, his hand dropping to his side, and letting his cloak cover any movements he might be making for weapons. Eirika realized that her own hand was still on her baton. It was always better to give the wary dead zoners the benefit of the doubt, and allow a conversation to build. In the name of not escalating anyone's worries, she deliberately pulled her hand away, and stopped a reassuring distance from the pair.

“Are you the group with the little girl? I saw you from the air earlier.”

The serious man looked as though he was trying to form a greeting, but the technician half a pace behind him spoke up first. “You were flying?”

“Yes. I'm doing a survey of the net expansion in Renais. We're currently on the southern leg. If you wanted to join our group for protection, we could escort you anywhere along the border.”

“Thank you, but that won't be necessary,” the technician's smile was tight. Eirika wondered what he looked like with his goggles off. There was a certain softness in his voice that reminded her of Lyon's inflections, and what little hair was left uncovered was pale enough that the technician even looked a little like Grado's disruptor lord. She looked more closely, seeing the patterns on his robe sleeves. The pale blue stripes were worn and torn in places, but she recognized them from her training. “Oh, you were at the college of techno—”

There were footsteps behind her, and Tana called out her name just as she came around the fountain. “Eirika! Oh—hello everyone!”

Eirika looked back to the two men just in time to catch them sharing a quick glance. Or at least, the ungloved and goggled stranger's eyes looked toward the technician, and the technician inclined his head toward his companion for a moment. It was hard to tell what was going on through the dust goggles the technician wore, which were the cloudy kind preferred by Jehannites. What an odd collection of parts the technician was turning out to be. But the serious man nodded graciously in Tana's direction. “I am Saleh, Eirika. It is good to meet you.”

Oh good. Exchanging names usually meant that a dead zoner was willing to open up, at least, open up enough not to be hostile. “And you, too. This is Tana. She's the pilot. We were looking for fuel, actually, but when I saw you from the air, I hoped we might be able to help you.”

“You should be able to get fuel from any of these cables,” the technician nodded toward the tree. “Saleh was just examining the rate of decay, and as you can see the cables are dormant.”

“I noticed. I'm a little surprised, though, do you have your own jammers? They must be something if they can force full disruptor dormancy on the net. Is it some new technology out of Grado?”

The corners of the technician's mouth raised upward in what might have been a slight smile. There was no way to judge what expression his eyes were carrying, thanks to the goggles, but Eirika noticed his shoulders droop slightly. “No. Grado is enmeshed in its own problems, I suspect. Jammers right now are likely a low priority.”

Hm. So something else was doing this. Also, he sounded as though he knew something more about Grado than Eirika did. Had he come through Serafew's zone? “So, you know about Serafew, then?”

“I,” another one of those shared glances. It was almost, Eirika thought, as though Saleh was trying to nudge the technician the way Tana would nudge Vanessa into volunteering non-practical, silly opinions around the campfire. A physical 'go on, I'm right behind you. Your thoughts on graffiti reclamation are as interesting as mine, and certainly more interesting than Eirika's' push. “Has something happened at Serafew?”

“It's possible that it has gone rogue,” Tana said matter-of-factly. “That's what I wanted to tell you, Eirika. Vanessa and Seth are coming back. They ran into trouble of some kind. I think Seth might be hurt. He didn't sound so good on the communicant, but this whole area is—well, it's like being inside a disruptor bubble. The communicants might be distorting people's voices.”

“Serafew is a big core?” Saleh's expression spoke of a tourist who had lost their road map for the disruptor zone while he looked from Eirika to Tana, and finally over his shoulder again at his companion.

His companion and Tana nodded, but Eirika felt compelled to add: “Its creation was a joint project between Renais and Grado. My father, disruptor . Core Fado, was very proud of the design. I'm not sure how big the core itself is, but it means a lot on both sides of the border. It was the first step to connecting Renais' disruptor network to the wall of silence.”

“Which luckily failed,” the technician muttered, causing Eirika to stare at him, aghast. He did not even so much as flinch. “You said you had companions coming in. I think we should all introduce ourselves properly, and talk somewhere quiet. At the very least, if anyone is injured, we could do something to heal them.”

“Myrrh said that she wished to inspect the old book shop,” Saleh said. “There wouldn't be any dust above ground level.”

“You let a little girl go off on her own?” Tana blurted out.

“As I said,” the technician made the motions of smiling with the bottom half of his face once more, “proper introductions are deserved all around.”

However, when Vanessa and Franz came up the stairs with a limping Seth in tow, the technician did not do much to introduce himself, sitting in the background, as Saleh ordered Seth be stretched out on the floor. Seth protested when Saleh placed cautious fingers on the leg refusing to bear the protector's weight, and asked where the pain was coming from, and what it felt like.

“I am Saleh, from Caer Pelyn,” he added as an afterthought, as though that gave him credentials to be a practicing doctor. “You've been cut, and it looks bad, but I think the real problem is your hip dislocation. Is the pain worse along your leg, or does it feel as though it is shooting up your spine?”

“It really isn't that bad,” Seth lied. His eyebrows drew together, and he turned his head toward Eirika to check if the three strangers were trustworthy. She nodded, in what she hoped was a subtle manner. Seth seemed to take that as his cue to report. “Serafew has a swarm of armatures around it. Not something that we should attempt to take out on our own.”

“The pain, Mister Seth. If I'm to get your leg back together I really do need to know the proper way of doing it,” Saleh interrupted.

It didn't take too much more fussing, although Saleh ordered both Franz and Vanessa to hold Seth still as he pulled, and then pushed the offending leg, blood from the gash in Seth's thigh beginning to dribble over his fingers just as it popped into place.

Vanessa rocked back on her heels, nodded in satisfaction. “Well, you've looked better, protector Seth, but he did a neat job of it. But we must talk about Serafew. Lady Eirika, I got a good look at the core, and took some photos. Your father will want to send in a full team to quell it. We should get this information back to him right away. After we sew Seth back up.”

“At least he is not infected,” Myrrh spoke up.

Tana and Eirika had come to learn over the past few hours that Myrrh was generally more retiring than the technician, but when she did speak, she was usually very certain about things. Franz's expression spelled relief, but Seth's and Vanessa's were suspicious.

Saleh saw the obvious suspicion, and moved between Eirika's escorts direct line of attack and Myrrh almost protectively. “Lady Myrrh knows what she is speaking of. I am a roboticist of Caer Pelyn, and I have served the automatons for years. She can sense the infection in organic beings.”

“Further, it is also my core that is controlling this area,” Myrrh added. “You all noticed the cables did not even stir when you took your needed fuel from them. So, when making plans, please do not count on this place being safe when I leave.”

Seth stared. Eirika stared. Everyone in the Renais group, she thought, stared at the travelers, very rudely. Franz cleared his throat. “I, uh, thought the robots were all deactivated by the demon core hundreds of years ago?”

“I am one of the last. Now, disruptor Lady Eirika, could you please introduce your friends? There is a lot that we need to discuss.”

“Ah, yes. I am Eirika of Renais, and these are Seth, senior protector of the Renais disruptor, and Franz, an apprentice in that work. Lady Tana and Captain Vanessa are escorts that I have on loan from Frelia's disruptor zone.”

“The net has reached that far to the northwest, then?” the technician asked. He still kept his robe's hood up, but the goggles were around his neck now, giving them all a view of a face that had not seen much sleep and fewer pleasant dreams. He couldn't be much older than Eirika, but the hollow eyed expression made him seem much older.

“Yes,” Tana nodded, smiling encouragingly. “You seem to know a lot about net activity, sir. I can see you have a technician's robe from Grado's College of Technomancy. Are you on an expedition like Eirika's for Grado?”

“My mission has been to find the infected core at the center of these past two years of disturbance,” Myrrh told them all. “Techno—nician Knoll is merely our guide to the southwest. I have not left the lands of Caer Pelyn, and Saleh is more familiar with the southeast, rather than the settled lands.”

“Is that advisable?” Vanessa asked, looking at the group. “There are only three of you, and, forgive me, but if unscrupulous people found out about you, Myrrh, many of them would deeply want to study your core and try to replicate its secrets. Humanity needs to expand the disruptor zones, and your prototype could save hundreds of thousands.”

Myrrh pushed aside Saleh's clenched hand. “If it was replicable. But it is not, and enough of my kind have been dismantled looking for that sinecure.”

“A small group can travel without too much worry,” Knoll added. “Even in the dead zones outside the protection of the disruptors, the people living there are easy enough to avoid, and the monsters—we can take care of the monsters.”

Eirika bit at her thumbnail thoughtfully, caught herself, and pulled her hands from her face hurriedly. “But, you are certain that the center is in Grado?”

“Very certain,” Saleh nodded.

“Still, avoiding all of that must be tiring, and adding time to your journey,” Tana said considering, looking toward Eirika with a plea in her eyes. “We can escort you to the Grado border guard at least, going the direct route. It's not that far from here. It would only take a day? Would that be alright? We have to talk to them anyway—”

The three travelers were glancing at each other again. “We won't be dealing with the guard,” Saleh interrupted, his words coming out slowly. “They will be busy enough with the Serafew disruptor, and we hope to shut down the problem without getting too many people involved.”

“It sounds as though you know what the problem is,” Vanessa said, looking at the three sharply.

“Vanessa!” Tana squeaked.

“That is what it sounds like, and if they do know what the problem is, Lord Innes will want to know as well.”

“And I must know,” Eirika added. “My brother was sent to investigate the reach of the activity beyond Renais' borders. I know he went toward Jehanna, but his escorts last report to our father was from the Grado edge of the desert. Every sign we've encountered has pointed to Grado. I think he may have gone into the safe zone itself.”

There was a little sigh from Knoll's corner. It might have been tinged with regret, or annoyance. The technician obviously felt the eyes of the party turning toward him. “Sorry. It was only to be expected, I suppose. Grado is highly unsafe right now.”

“But the wall,” Eirika began. “Nothing driven by a core can operate until inside the disruptor zone of the city.”

“How old is the wall of silence?” Knoll asked, very quietly. “You studied at the college for—three years? You would have taken Metaphysical core Theory, and I know they cover the wall quite extensively there.”

“Well, eight hundred years old,” Eirika's mouth felt dry. “About.”

“And you think it was so well designed and made it would last eight hundred years?”

Myrrh made a noise that was too polite to be derisive, but Eirika felt distinctly that Myrrh was inviting her to be part of a general laugh at the frailness of human creation. “I'm nearly twelve hundred. But I'm not the size of a whole city state, I generally have no more than two people taking care of my systems at a time, and mostly I can fix any problem I diagnose on my own.”

“Grado's wall has been slowly failing for about twenty years, possibly fifty, though the records I had access to did not stretch back that far,” Knoll said quietly. “It became the obsession of the last few years to find something to replace the system, as we can't rebuild it. Half of the wall is scrapped technology from pre-core Jehanna. Even the best geniuses of the college can't make sense of it. We all knew it was going to fail, and the growth inside the wall is too important to lose. We were trying everything to retain what progress Grado has been able to make over the last eight centuries. We even got permission to experiment with the tamed core.”

Eirika sucked in her breath, and Seth raised an eyebrow at her, understanding that she was one of the few people in the room with the background to appreciate the scope of the desperation. Saleh's expression was that of someone who had heard all of this before, and was not surprised. Myrrh shared that expression, but while she was more expressive than Eirika would have imagined from stories of the automatons, her expressions did not change often. Still, if Knoll was traveling with them, it stood to reason that they all knew this.

“One year ago, the whole wall shut down, taking the tamed core with it. When the core started up again, it ripped the dormant cables from the walls and floor, infecting almost all of the technicians working on the new system. We managed to erect a disruptor barrier around it, which slowed the spread of infection to the systems we have hooked into the core. But the damage was done. Grado is currently the center of a rogue core, which is slowly trying to advance on all of the tamed cores,” Knoll sat back.

Silence reigned. Eirika could see Franz's curly head looking wildly around the circle but even though his mouth was open, he wasn't speaking. Vanessa was staring intently at the same patch of floor, her eyebrows furrowed. Did she know how terrible this was? Or were the terms just words that she had to take back to Innes?

That was unfair, and unkind to someone who had been a great companion this whole trip. But from Vanessa's perspective, her very military perspective that was part of Frelia's old fashioned outlook on life, this was just a problem for the outside world to deal with. Eirika had friends in Grado, her brother might be in Grado, she knew how much human knowledge might be lost in Grado if a rogue core was out hunting the populace.

She looked across to Knoll's shadowed corner, and saw the technician sitting with his head tipped back, knees drawn up to his chest, and his mouth pulled back tight in a long grimace. If she was worried about the bright friends like Lyon caught in the middle of this disaster, she could only imagine what someone who had grown up and studied in Grado's safety might feel. How many friends had he lost? How many were simply dead, and how many were still walking, a core growing inside of them until it took over their higher functions and turned them into nothing more than rippers?

“We have to tell everyone,” Seth said at last.

“Tell them what? That an exile banished from Grado for plotting against the disruptor lord in a fit of insanity claims Grado's own tamed core has gone rogue?” Knoll laughed suddenly, a sound like dry gravel slithering around as a cable pushed through it. “Did I forget to mention? Those of us who survived were arrested based on our, hah, confessions to having changed the controls of the tamed core when explaining what happened to our counselors. They said it was insanity that made us toy with things we shouldn't have tried to control. My research notes have been deleted. My experiments have been credited with disruptor Lord Vigarde's infection on that night. I'm part of a group that tried to kill a disruptor lord and destroy my home in a desire to see, scientifically, what would happen. After the trial, the disruptor lord exiled me. So, yes, tell the world that what little safety they have is compromised, and the person who brings that news is a traitor who might conceivably want revenge.”

“Myrrh isn't, however,” Tana said slowly. “Saleh isn't. Their support of you means even if anyone is ridiculous enough not to trust your honesty—”

“A girl who claims to be a robot, and a man from Caer Pelyn, which is the living zone, so alien to anything we might imagine that they could not understand what it is to live in the dead zone,” Seth countered wearily. “I can see that it looks less than trustworthy. If Kyle were here, we could probably figure out some way to make it sound credible in time, but the sooner this is stopped, the better. Eirika, you and I must return to your Father. If we can convince him, we can put a whole party together. Tana and Vanessa, I suppose, have their own—”

“No,” Eirika said, looking at her bleeding protector sadly. She hated to argue with anyone who had been at her father's side for so long, but there were right things to do, and wrong things to do. “If Technician Knoll is an exile, and if anyone in Grado is pretending to law and order, he will need help. You're planning on shutting the core down, aren't you? Using Myrrh.”

“Myrrh couldn't control the core with her own, even if,” Knoll paused, testing out the taste of some explanation, possibly. “Some of the modifications to Grado's core that I designed might be online, and if they are, Myrrh would not be able to even do as much as the disruptors. But shutting down the core is the general plan. Grado will lose pretty much everything that relied on the core to regulate it, but all of the rogue cores it created will shut down as well, and can be recovered, at least. Even if the capital must be destroyed.”

Vanessa looked as though she was sucking on a lemon. She looked to Tana. “My lady, I have my orders from your brother, but in this instance your word on the immediate situation would be the one I follow. Please be aware that it will look exceedingly bad if members of the military are caught trying to shut down another territory's core, rogue or tamed, without the permission of the disruptor lord. But as a captain, I can tell you that I would want us to see the truth of this ourselves, if not commit to this plan. The evidence of a rogue core is too obvious, and that makes Technician Knoll's statements credible. We don't want to be within the range of Grado's core if it goes demon, and time is critical.”

Seth scowled. “You can't just waltz across the border through the wall without letting anyone know about the dangers. Both Hayden and his lady need to know as much as disruptor Lord Fado. Eirika—”

“I'm going over, Seth. I am a disruptor lady, and I actually have the engineering and training to possibly make a difference at the core.”

“Then I—”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, protector,” Saleh said firmly, “but you have a break in your skin. You're a liability right now. We can bandage you up, and your body will scab over, but until it scars and heals, you, out of all of us, could become infected the most easily. While Myrrh could control you, and Knoll could stabilize you, we don't need to spend our energies that way if we can help it.”

A cold weight settled over the sun set filled room. Everyone looked around. Franz looked scared, but he cleared his throat. “Um, our instructions are to protect Lady Eirika. But, if she joins this group, the same number of people would be protecting her, correct? I'll bring protector Seth back to the Renais disruptor zone. If Lady Tana will assure us that Captain Vanessa's loyalty will remain with Lady Eirika, we could relay the relevant information to Lord Fado, and get a message to Lord Hayden.”

“If anything, Lady Tana should return to her father, and—” Seth grimaced as Saleh offered a hand to take him to a near wall to brace him.

Vanessa shook her head. “Tana needs protection when her plane comes down to look for fuel. That shorts this party of two people. One to accompany you back, and one to accompany Tana onward to Frelia.”

“And,” Franz obviously knew he was skating over the thinnest film of ice, and looked very queasy about it. “Lady Tana's plane radio can be configured to receive long range messages from the disruptor control room, which none of the wrist communicants are able to do. If Lady Tana and Captain Vanessa are going into Grado, we still should be able to send and receive reports.”

“Assuming enough of the wall has failed for that,” Eirika added.

Knoll nodded. “The whole wall is gone. The disruptor stations are still active, but they probably have all been compromised by this point. It has been a year, and since the net is spreading outside of Grado now,” he paused, to let everyone fill in the rest.

“I wouldn't be going into Grado if the wall was still active,” Myrrh pointed out. “I have been around for many years, and I believe I would find the sensation of being dampened to the point where I could not longer detect the passage of time, or observe the world, too unpleasant to assay.”

Eirika shuddered. “It would let up inside the capital?”

“Because waking up after a week of travel, making allowances for the fact that someone would have to carry me, and assuming a minimum of interference from the dead zone dwellers, when I have no sense of time, and no sense of the environment would not play haywire with my systems and leave me unsettled afterward,” Myrrh smiled brightly. “Still, I say, no thank you.”

“Understandable,” Seth concluded dryly, now propped up by both a wall and the edge of a bookcase. “So. You all from Caer Pelyn have your own mission. Lady Eirika is joining that mission, and cannot be replaced, as she is the only one of us who has knowledge of core Mechanics. Captain Vanessa and Lady Tana need to go along because their planes can be used as message relay stations. Franz is still healthy and whole, and as such needs to accompany me back to Renais, where I will make my report.”

“That does sound accurate,” Vanessa concurred.

Seth was still staring at Eirika. “I want it noted that you are doing this over my extreme protests as protector of Renais. By making the party larger, you are adding to the chance that they all could be caught. If you want them to succeed, you will have to rely on Captain Vanessa's experience in the field to guide you.”

“Saleh has crossed through Jehanna and worked closely with their mercenary bands before,” Knoll interrupted dryly. “Captain Vanessa's experience is invaluable, and it is not as though you're leaving your lady to fend for herself in a dead zone while the pilots keep to the air.”

“That's not the point,” Seth spared one glance for Knoll. “Saleh, and Captain Vanessa might have experience with serious dead zone combat. I suspect that you have seen more than your fair share, as you must have gotten from the capital of Grado to Caer Pelyn somehow, and there is no safe zone route that you could traverse in under a year. But Myrrh is, by her own admission, unused to the world outside the living zone, and Eirika and Tana are grossly inexperienced when it comes surviving outside the disruptor zone. You will promise me, _both_ you and Tana, that you will not endanger the party.”

Eirika could tell that he had a very specific manner of endangerment in mind. “I admit, I do hope to find news of my brother, both for my sake, and my Father's, if we can get the planes to work as long distance communicators. But I do know which priority is more important. You can trust me, Seth.”

Seth smiled slightly, inclining his head, before hissing as his boot twitched too close to Franz's knee. “Ah, I think I will need the bandaging that everyone keeps talking about. This is beginning to sting”

“Technician Knoll, Tana and I need to look at our planes and see what we need to do to convert their communications,” Vanessa said.

Eirika nodded, moving to help Saleh and Franz by holding Seth still. She would be heading out beyond all the protection that she had known before, and relying on a group of strangers. She spared a glance for the blood orange glow of the afternoon sun spilling across dusty cable devoured shelves and pages. She was not ready to go into such danger, but she needed to be ready. That was all there was to it.


	4. A Question of Loyalty

Kyle wiped the blood from his hands with what was left of the water that they had collected to clean out the new wounds up and down the growing slash in Ephraim's side, staring at the invasive little gadget broken under his foot. It was better than looking at Ephraim, who had actual beads of sweat sticking to his temples. It was better even than looking at the torn hillsides of Grado all around them. He could look at the piece of the parasite burrowing into Ephraim's body, glare at the viscous fluid surrounding it, and feel some sort of control, seeing multi-segmented arms meant to rip into Ephraim's flesh lying broken and twitching in the dust.

Ephraim inhaled too sharply, and then began coughing. Kyle stooped immediately to hold his lord upright until the dust cleared from his lungs. Was the clammy back under his hand stiffer and less forgiving that yesterday? No matter how many of these little probes he tore from the infected slash, thousands more could be moving under Ephraim's skin, changing the body in ways that no one could predict.

“Seven times at noontide.”

Kyle reserved a long look for his lord. “What?”

“That's the eighth one you pulled out of me,” Ephraim nodded to the smashed mechanism, “since we got within sight of the capital. They're doing whatever they do faster, I think.”

“You have no idea how much it _thrills_ me to hear you say that. My lord,” Kyle hastily added, realizing that he had allowed too much acid to drip into his tone.

“I'm not my father,” Ephraim snapped right back.

They stared at one another in the dimming twilight. It had been happening more and more often. The further into Grado they got, the closer to the living death Ephraim grew. A doctor fleeing Serafew had managed to implant what she called neutralizers, and that slowed down the scabrous metal advancing over Ephraim's side into these little mechanical parasites that Kyle could pull out, but the longer they remained in the wasteland with only themselves and Forde to talk with, the more they snapped and bit at one another. That wasn't the right thing to do when your brother in arms was in pain.

Kyle reached out his hand with Ephraim's blood caught and dried around his fingernails to touch a sweat wet shoulder. “Here. Let's dry you off and get bandaged up.”

Ephraim ran his scarred fingers through his hair. “At least I'm not throwing up any more.”

“Does that mean it's less painful, or that you are more used to the pain, though?”

The first few days Kyle had tried to save him from the agony that tensed his muscles to rock as Kyle dug in under the latest machine growth. That had not lasted. He was still finding excuses for Forde to go out and reconnoiter whenever they paused for the evening, stripped Ephraim of armor and shirt, and checked the progress of the core, burrowing into his flesh.

“I'm hoping both.”

Kyle fumbled with the sad rag that he had used to wipe his own hands, trying to find a part of it that wasn't gross for Ephraim. “That's an odd wish.”

“I heard once that the infection can sometimes spread to a person's brain, but instead of making them try to kill and infect everyone around them, it turns them into something like an automaton. An automaton that takes everything very literally, and can't use funny words or anything. If I can still make bad jokes, then we both know I'm alright.”

Fires and Darkness, he'd really thought all that through. Kyle retrained an hysterical laugh. He buried it in making sure that the new opening he had torn in Ephraim skin was clean, and the body warm metal of the infection was still light-less after the poke he had given it with the disruptor. When would the green lights signaling core reactivation run down along his side.

“I didn't think I would lose this much control, honestly,” Ephraim added, staring at the high, physical wall that marked the beginning of Grado's capital.

In the cool evening air, Kyle felt ice in his lungs. He kept re-wrapping the bandage. Ephraim didn't even comment on the way his hands shook. Maybe he didn't even notice.

Ephraim continued, talking, letting words fill the stillness of the dead zone, with its flexing cables and rivulets of 800 years worth of topsoil running like blood off the newly exposed net. “Infection is supposed to happen quickly, isn't it? I mean, I thought it was supposed to happen within two weeks. The rogue core controlling whatever it is that infects you is programmed to do it efficiently and quickly, otherwise, it shuts the seed core down until you next get infected. I remember that much from my lessons.”

“We've been inside the wall of silence almost since the moment you were infected,” the ice spears of traitorous realization were leaking into Kyle's thoughts and he desperately wanted to stem the tide.

“I was failing Basic Programming Logic, remember? My father's messages weren't happy that year. I'm sure you heard him yelling at the transmitter. Goodness knows Eirika heard them on our end. Anyway, I got Lyon to tutor me, and after the mid term I'd done so badly he said 'You are so unwilling to actually try, you're worse than those idiots out there who refuse to see that the wall is failing. At least they're not confronted with their stupidity and the means to fix it _every_ single day.' You know, with his voice hitching up on the 'every' the way it does when he's slightly annoyed, but is afraid to say so,” Ephraim chuckled at the memory of someone Kyle had never met. After the little silence that followed, the one where Ephraim waited for his sister's good humor and it never came, the disruptor lord cleared his throat. “Um. I don't think the wall of silence has worked for a long time.”

Of course it was not working. Not if the cables were moving in Grado's borders at will. So, nothing had really been impeding that core Seed inside of Ephraim. But it hadn't shut down.

“So, the infection doesn't work the way you thought it did,” Kyle pressed slowly, resuming his bandaging.

Ephraim lifted his arms slightly so that Kyle wouldn't try to wriggle his fingers around the lord's sides in a ghostly dance of ' _not_ touching, very much _not_ touching, would never presume to touching, if I can help it.' “Not that I wanted to become a ripper, or some machine walking around in my own skin. But I thought it would happen quickly, and when it couldn't defeat me, it would stop trying to take revenge in my sweat glands or whatever is acting up today.”

Kyle's hands came to a stop. “You 'wanted'—You thought that it would happen quickly? 'Defeat' an infection?!”

Ephraim never took his gaze away from the city wall. But his arms lowered. They were touching.

“Say it.”

A command, with that tone Ephraim used when he was biting off 'and lecture me now. Let's get this over with.' This Lyon was not the only one who kept a check on his words, though possibly for different reasons.

“You _wanted_ to get infected,” the words were bitter on Kyle's lips. They churned in his stomach in a sour, upset mess. “You knew we were too far away from anything but Grado to get help before the infection spread, and you wanted to investigate.”

“I didn't _want_ to get infected. I'm not a complete fool. I just—knew I still had options if it did happen. And I do have friends here—”

“Forde has a little brother at home! Did you even think of that?! You dragged him into danger with you, and he's practically a parent! I know Seth didn't want you to bring him,” it was hissing out now, all the snapping thoughts about the unfairness of being a doctor to a recalcitrant patient in the middle of a mission trying to eat them alive. Kyle was better than this. He had to be more controlled than this. But the words were leaking like puss around the metallic infection in Ephraim's side, and he was gripping hard muscle that might have been flesh, might have been skin stretched over metal, and he just wouldn't know how much of Ephraim's human body would remain if they managed to find a cure inside the capital's high walls.

“And what will your sister and father do without you? Getting infected in the middle of the dead zone?! It was a _death sentence_ but for the grace of that doctor we met. You're using our need for a cure as an excuse to search for people who have their own disruptor lords and protectors, and I can't believe that you would even see a bright side in destroying yourself like this. Except, of course, I can believe it. I believe it very much.”

Not even insects chirped or buzzed in a dead zone. Kyle began to check the bandage, tightening the coils where his sudden stop had left them slack. Ephraim drew in a breath under his hands. “Don't leave me hanging. Where's the rest? You can't leave me half flayed. I've endangered Forde, endangered myself—isn't there one more person in the picture who should have his own say about unwilling danger?”

“You didn't trust me with your full reasoning, and you used your injury as an excuse not to have an argument with me about going into Grado. I'm terrified you'll die. You're my lord, I'm your protector, and you named me your comrade in arms. If you die, I have failed Renais, and you.

“But—unwilling to go into danger with you? I could have stolen the stasis unit the doctor had, knocked you out and dragged you back to Renais in cryosleep so that the seed core was shut down until we could disable it. Don't think that you're the only one in this party with an easy solution to an argument. I just choose not to take that solution, because I understand that you have your reasons for going into danger, even infected. My duty is to stay and protect you. I will never be unwilling to do that.”

One of those long silences like the embarrassment of a training group that had not studied and had just been asked a vital question by the group leader followed. “Oh,” Ephraim said at last, sounding very small.

“Besides, if you turn, I can't have anyone else—someone will have to,” he paused again, and decided he wasn't brave enough to say it, “take care of you. Between Forde and I, we'll manage.”

“Ah.”

Sometimes Ephraim's single syllable responses conveyed a lot of meaning, at least to the person who uttered them. Sometimes, they were just there to fill air. Ephraim winced as he leaned over Kyle's arm to grab his shirt.

Stones and gravel skittered somewhere close by, and Forde was leaping over cables, running with his disruptor staff out and crackling.

“Three armatures are digging a hole in the wall less than 500 meters away,” he said, skidding to a stop. “The cables are _very_ active over there, too. But with the gate shut, this might be our best chance to get inside. That area of the capital has to have been evacuated, because there's no human resistance. Just the net getting very tetchy.”

“At what?” Ephraim asked, “The wall?”

“No, the armatures,” Forde's teeth flashed in a grin. “Not that I can figure out why, but let's not look the gift horse in the mouth or whatever.”

“We should investigate,” Kyle reached for Ephraim's stiff leather armor. Ford had done a good job on the repair. “If they're that close, wouldn't they have spotted our camp?”

“You two hadn't even lit a fire,” Forde pointed out. “And Ephraim's body temperature hasn't been as high as ours since he was infected. With the sun we had today on all this black earth and cabling? Neither of you would have shown up on any thermal scan, and we all have enough dirt on our clothes now to look like part of the landscape for a visual scan.”

“I still say that when machines start to act outside of their typical AI we should be wary.”

“Gift horse. Mouth,” Forde retorted, though he had nodded along to Kyle's caution. “Have either of you ever seen a horse?”

“They have them in the living zone farms, I think,” Ephraim's voice was muffled as he pulled his tunic over his head. “The pictures make them look kind of strange.”

Kyle helped Ephraim to tug his tunic down where it was bunching over his trousers in the back, and handed him his belt. He thought that he caught some eye rolling behind Forde's goggles. “No.”

“Do you ever wonder why we say 'don't look a gift horse in the mouth,' then?”

“No,” Kyle and Ephraim shot back simultaneously. 'Have you ever wondered...' 'Have you ever thought about...' were stock Forde phrases when he was nervous. It was as though he felt all of his observations of the world needed to be out there, just in case he could never make them again.

Kyle was in a loveable mood that evening, obviously.

Ephraim took the armor from him. As he struggled into it, Kyle couldn't help noticing that even for fighting leather the movements were stiff and jerky. He almost wanted to ask Ephraim to make a joke, but Forde would probably interject, and really there was something grim about admitting to someone else that Ephraim's sense of humor might be the only thing that that indicated whether he was alive.

It was probably just some urban legend Ephraim was repeating anyway. Kyle knew better than to get caught up in the morbidity of it.

“We'll get within eyesight, but don't attack unless I give the signal,” Ephraim said, grabbing for his disruptor staff. He glanced at the crackling arcs of energy from Forde's staff. “Turn that off until we need it.”

The three young men nodded, and slowly began to walk south from their campsite, following Forde's lead.


	5. The Witching Hour

The sunset slanted into Saleh's eyes, waking him. He stretched, and turned to look for Myrrh. She sat with Knoll, going through her diagnostic read out as usual. A little way from that intimate huddle, Tana and Vanessa were relaying whatever communication from Renais that had reached them during the hot noontide. Their camp had managed to divide itself, despite the watch schedules that had Knoll and Vanessa staying up to watch over the later sleepers, after Saleh and Tana had taken their turns. He breathed in, and out, trying to find a point where the selfish happiness of familiarity overrode getting to know all of their traveling companions.

He couldn't find that point, and Myrrh's tone was subdued as she spoke with Knoll. “It's still active in parts. I'm getting a signal, like a foreign network is asking me if I'm sure I wish to stay online. Every fifteen minutes and seven seconds, now. It's funny. I would almost believe the net is doing it.”

“It,” Knoll paused for a long moment, “it might be.”

“Excuse me, but if the core has gone rogue—”

“I was trying to program the net within Grado to act as a transmitter of the program that made the wall work. I liked the clean irony of the cables carrying their own instructions to stay dormant. But that program is just a packet of information. A big, complex packet of information that could get through the most advanced fail safes on any non-designated core. It would have needed designated cores to send it out, and to actually implement it. I don't suppose you can tell me anything more about the message you're receiving?”

“No. I'm sorry,” Myrrh waved at Saleh. “Knoll says we're almost to the capital. Captain Vanessa went on a quick reconnaissance flight while we were resting. They have closed all the gates in the outer wall, and the disruptor bubble is protecting the taller buildings from the air.”

They would have had to to protect the civilians. If Saleh had understood Myrrh's quiet conference correctly, any being powered by a core was roaming without being shut down, even if the cables were oddly still. It was obvious that they had ripped themselves free of the soil that had lain on top of them for hundreds of years, and all the plant life had been infected, but there was no movement to the cables now. When they stepped over the border last week, Myrrh had mentioned that she didn't even need to override their programming.

Not that the past week had been easy. Roaming bands of once human rippers and annihilators, and robocinerators had crossed their path towards the capital. None of the smaller disruptor zones that Eirika and Knoll remembered with fondness had been active. The few stranglers left in the dead zone were either heading to Renais, where people knew how to survive, or returning to the capital. Two hopeless survivors had talked about heading to Jehanna, because there you only had to worry about monsters, at least.

Grado, as far as Saleh could understand from both Eirika and Knoll, had been one large basically safe zone within the wall. None of the people had any of the daily experience with horrific creations that the other disruptor cities had. The nightmare in their eyes might be mirrored by the living zone residents of Caer Pelyn in a few years. And they could not run to Frelia The dormant demon core, the last of Lagdou's creations haunted, the eastern border. They all had a duty to protect the world against that nightmare reawakening. Though, looking at Grado, Saleh wondered what the actual distinction between a rogue core and a demon core would be.

“Is there any way in, once the gates are shut?” Saleh asked, looking at Knoll.

“Two, but I think we will be more successful if we choose the option that involves knocking on the door and asking for asylum. If the refugees have been as plentiful as I imagine they have this past week, the guard won't be too busy checking names and faces.”

“What's the other option?” Eirika asked, wandering over to the group, Tana and Vanessa in tow. “If things go wrong, I would like to have other areas to explore. I know if they remembered who I am, they might bring Lyon to come see us, but you were accused of getting his father infected. I would think he would remember you.”

Knoll winced. “I believe he might, too. We did study together, after all.”

“Oh! I didn't know that,” Eirika put her head on one side. “Were we at the college together? I don't recall seeing you.”

“I wouldn't think anyone would have noticed me. I was doing field research for most of my term, and you and your brother left the year I graduated into being a TA and worked in classes with the disruptor lord. Lyon always was a genius.”

Saleh caught a slight frown forming between Eirika's eyebrows at the wistful way Knoll said this. The next look she shot at him held something of pity, the kind Saleh knew Knoll did not want.

Knoll must have caught it, too, and he went on hurriedly. “Of course, the second option is that I can try hacking into the cables and make them break through the wall.”

“You can do that?!” Tana gasped.

Knoll shrugged. “Technically, yes. I was trained as a technomancer, with all of the little physical changes that entails. Successfully, probably not. With the way the cables are acting, I have to assume the core is in control of them, even if the core isn't making them active, and the likelihood of overriding the seed cores growing inside of them is not high.”

“And you would be exposing yourself to infection,” Eirika added. “It's not a good idea with a rogue core in control of the cables you are trying to tap into.”

Knoll waved some of the dust away from his face, and pulled his goggles down as an afterthought. “Tana didn't ask about that. Anyway, if anyone was monitoring the core, they would know I was trying to control the net.”

“And there would be someone trying to monitor the core at the very least,” Vanessa supplied, nodding. “Well, let's try knocking. Tana and I will need you to get us landing clearance inside the capital. I don't want to think about what could happen to our planes if whatever is keeping the net dormant decides not to work.”

“A wise precaution,” Myrrh nodded. “And may I request that you don't let anyone know who I am? I know it is hard to explain why a human my size would be traveling in the dead zone, particularly as I find simulating human fear to be difficult, but I believe with the state Grado is in, it would be better not to let anyone know that I am an automaton.”

The pilots went to their planes, and the group afoot pulled down their goggles. Saleh heard Eirika muttering under her breath. She must have caught him staring because she ducked her head. “Sorry. I was trying to remember all of my lectures about a safe core shut down without triggering activity in the net.”

“An EM wave can be trig-ger-ed by a fluid-inversion, the fluid-inversion is trig-ger-ed by the sluice valve,” Knoll recited, slightly sing-song. They shared a grin, and then looked away quickly. “I guess it's not quite like prepping for the core Mechanics exam.”

“Well, no. If it was like prepping for that, my brother would be accidentally waking me at the crack of dawn while he tried to sneak off to the protector's disruptor staff classes in the southern quad,” Eirika's voice was full of cheerful determination to focus on pleasant memories and not the looming horror that they had so recently seen.

Saleh wondered if that was how Eirika had learned how to use that arm length disruptor baton that she had wielded, very effectively, against the roving armatures and machine monsters. He still had a few drones stashed under his robe, and his knowledge of how any machine monster was put together to fall back on if they ran into trouble on this last leg of the journey. He wasn't sure if Knoll still had any drones left. Admittedly Saleh had tried to build new ones from the scrapped parts of the monsters that they had destroyed, but he could see, despite the notorious trickiness and need for close combat which left a person more likely to be cut open and infected, why a protector with a disruptor staff might be preferable for long journeys like theirs.

“Didn't your brother have a tendency to fail most of his exams?”

“Learning core mechanics like a true disruptor lord has never really been one of my brother's interests in life. He mostly sees it as being stuck to a chair all day, and never allowed to go outside. Despite all of the examples that prove it is not the case,” Eirika replied. “I'm sorry that he got such a reputation that the teaching assistants knew about him, though.”

“It was a legend that continued well after you two returned home, I am afraid. There was never anything but praise for you, however.”

Dust and dirt swirled around them on the treacherous terrain. In the fading twilight it looked like a green and blue fog, rather than the dirtier reality. Saleh breathed in and out. Finding a moment that lacked any selfish desires was, he would admit, not easy. Here he was hoping that these two would be able to forge a friendship, but how much was that a desire to see Knoll no longer walking alone with the thoughts that ate at him, and how much was that a desire to ensure that Knoll would not choose, if his secret fears were confirmed, to stay in Grado?

“Eirika,” Vanessa's voice crackled over the communicant on Eirika's wrist. “There's a group of people trying to fight off armatures and cables over the old road network a few meters to the southeast. They're almost at the base of the wall. We'll fly in support, but if your group can come in as well, get over the road bed, and head due south after that. You should be able to see the commotion very soon. It looks like two active armatures, and one disabled one. But the cables are writing and whipping in that small area. We can probably distract them with some projectiles, but we need actual disruptors, if you can join us swiftly. If not, we'll try to fly low enough to rescue the party, but the net is really active there.”

“We'll come,” Eirika nodded, looking to Saleh, who fished under his cloak grabbing two drones.

“Active cables, Myrrh. Can you override them?”

“Don't worry, I should be able to—” her eyes went blanker than normal. She normally spent a lot of processing power on mimicking human expression, but if she was running more complex processes that priority sank. “Error. I'm getting an error. I think it's because my signal is too weak.”

She sank to her hands and knees in a runner's pose. Saleh knew what was coming next. She was much heavier than any human her size, but she didn't have the same muscle and joint limitations, either, and could jump incredible distances, if not too high. Still, “please wait for us to get ahead of you, Automaton. We need to co-ordinate our arrival. Knoll, do you have any drones left?”

“No, I do not. I'll support Myrrh,” he waved the small screen of her diagnostics reader, and then frowned at it suddenly. “Myrrh, are you sure that it is distance that is the problem? This error message—”

“I believe it is distance. We will see soon enough. But if I cannot shut down the cables, nothing really has changed. The position will just have become more bleak than we originally anticipated,” she spent some effort on smiling.

“While I am honored you are beginning to share my sense of humor, I don't think this is the right time,” Knoll chuckled.

Saleh looked at Eirika. “If they cannot shut down the cables—”

“Our priority is to rescue those people, without endangering ourselves,” Eirika repeated the reminder that had been floating between the group throughout the journey. “If we can't do that, we both fall back.”

“We both fall back,” Saleh agreed.

They headed for the skeleton of the road. Cables massed along roadbeds. The net must have found roads the most efficient way to lay itself out. But it was still more stable footing than the dissected corpse of Gradoan fields. The fastest mode of travel through the forest of veins and arteries of the rogue core was by running leaps and hops that could clear bundles of cables at a time. Behind them Saleh could hear Knoll, not running, but jumping and walking with more care to the terrain.

Then they cleared the asphalt of the roadway, and saw in the dark the flash of disruptor staffs further away against the huge black bulk of the capital's protective wall. Machine creaks and rusty squeals filled the air, punctuated by a crackle clack as the disruptors poked and prodded pieces of the armatures into false dormancy.

A cable came whistling overhead, and Saleh tried not to think of the tug of wind on his hair or how close he had come to having his head taken off. Two more pipe-thick cables sped for his abdomen, but Eirika was there, lashing out with her baton, and Saleh slid to a halt. Pressing the on switches of his drones with both thumbs, he tossed the small mobile disruptors into the air, and fished around, hoping for a flare drone so that Vanessa would have more than Eirika's communicant to go on.

The planes zipped overhead, raining down quick pellet fire that tore through cables, and had one of the staff wielders ducking behind the shielded plating of what might once have been a tractor before it was infected. He had to have a flare on him somewhere. A spotlight. Anything.

“We're pulling back!” Vanessa yelled over Eirika's comm. “It's too dark, and I'm worried about ricochet with that other party in so close to the machines.”

“We'll be fi—ahh!”

A snake of segmented metal whipped into Eirika's chest, knocking her off her feet. It shuddered on it's way over Eirika's head, and switched direction, disconnecting in the middle so the sharp spikes of the joining spines stabbed for her stomach and throat.

Saleh's drone spun in mid air, their arc of disruption blacking white as they flew along the column, and Eirika's baton whirled, parrying the strike to her upper body. The cables collapsed into the dust, and Saleh helped Eirika to her feet again just in time to scramble out of the way of another attack from the net.

Air whistled over head. Myrrh slammed into the ground in a crouch, her joints leaking the yellow light of her core working in over time. Blank eyes and a mask of a face stared forward as the armatures stilled and froze. Long disruptor staffs crackled, jamming into the monsters and taking out the power source. They creaked and sagged. The tortured tractor, which looked as though it was already forced too out of shape For a moment everything was quiet.

“We're alright?” Someone said in the trembling twilight.

“Error.”

“Forde, is that you?!”

“Eirika!”

“Error.”

“Brother?! What are you doing in—”

“ _Error!_ ” Myrrh shrilled, her body stiff amid the cables.

From the base of the capital's wall, the net was moving. It rolled in a vast wave of creaking groans and shifting soil. The the cable ends became sharp visible furies flashing through the air, surging for Myrrh. Saleh ran. She had landed so far away. But no no no—

She raised an arm to protect her face and Saleh heard the click and scrape. He saw the black spikes deflected back into the gathering shadows, but more were coming. A smaller tendril snaked toward her, aiming at the bright yellow glow lines. He heard the sound of her cloak tearing. He heard shouting about a girl being in danger. He heard footsteps. His drones flew in overhead. Someone was trying to run toward Myrrh from the cables further out.

Saleh skidded in, directing the drones to fly in a protective circle around Myrrh. Ahead of them disruptor staffs and Eirika's lone baton blazed and whacked. Behind them Knoll arrived in a shower of pebbles and dust, falling to the ground promptly as a sneakier cable flashed over his head. Green light blazed suddenly as he rolled up one sleeve, and grabbed for a tendril to jam into the cored port on his arm.

“Error. No! Error. Error. I can override—” Myrrh began, reaching for Knoll as though that could stop him. A cable flashed between Eirika's side and around Saleh's flailing arm, slamming into Myrrh's back with a crunch. She went sprawling and the cables all dropped flat.

Saleh bent to check Myrrh. Her outer chassis was not harmed, as far as he could tell, but the glaze could be cracked for all he knew. It was too dark. He took the hand she raised, and helped her turn over. He face was blank, but again that could be the darkness, or a skip in processing power, or anything.

Reunions were happening all around him, mostly of the brotherly and sisterly variety, with enthusiastic hugs and communicants crackling with Tana's voice squeaking in excitement.

“Shh—ow.”

“Lady Eirika, Lord Ephraim managed to get injured on his left side. I think you're hugging—”

“I'm fine, Kyle. Ignore him. He's just tired with bandaging me up. What are you doing here?”

“I was surveying the extent of the rogue core's devastation for Father, but it got to be a long story. What happened to you? Kyle's right, you're—”

“Fine!”

“Stiff as a board,” Eirika overrode her brother. “Oh no, did you crack a rib or something? Is that a cast under your armor?”

The response was slow in coming. “Not exactly. It's a long story, and part of why I'm here.”

The planes came spiraling down in blasts of displaced dust and motor noise. Saleh saw Myrrh's mouth move, but couldn't hear anything.

“I promise, I'm fine,” Knoll sounded even less convincing that Ephraim as he locked eyes with the robot on the ground.

One of the other grimy faced young men working with Eirika's brother had sidled up and was scrutinizing Knoll's exposed arm as closely as he could without touching it. “So, does being able to jam cables into yourself just come with an infection, or is it something you get to work at?”

“You work at it, a lot,” Knoll grimaced, trying to pull down his sleeve. “If by 'work at' you mean 'constantly write override programs and viruses that will shut down core operation and store them in the computerized bits of your body with the help of nasty machines implanted in your spine.' I don't recommend it.”

Tana appeared out of the dark, wiping sweat from her face. She looked as though she wanted to great Ephraim, but the image presented by Knoll with green light leaking down his arm was too engaging. “Is that what you meant when you said you could take control of the cables? Aren't you getting seed cores injected—”

“Yes, and yes. There are reasons for having hundreds of thousands of programs that shut down cores stored inside me. But it turns out that option three for getting inside Grado's core was the most practical, if we wanted to keep everyone alive or uninfected. Or mostly uninfected,” there was a hint of exasperated scorn in his voice as he looked over the group. “I _do_ have access to all of the data the net has on us right now.”

“Do you have access to any information that would get us into the capital?” the young man identified as Kyle asked, a trifle quickly, as Eirika started and then looked at her brother's group in clear worry.

“That, we will not have to worry about.”

“Which means that because you are controlling the net, person hooked into Grado's core is going to come out to us, because that is annoying him so much,” Myrrh scowled. “Please stop. You're going to get hurt.”

Eirika stepped back. “Someone is hooked into a rogue core—just like Knoll's technomancy?”

“Yes,” Myrrh levered herself to her feet with the help of Saleh's arm. “That's why I couldn't get in, and I was trying to warn Knoll before he did this.”

“Wait,” it looked as though Ephraim was pinching his nose in the dark. “You're, you're not human? Or are you some kind of technomancer, too?”

“I'm a robot. I don't need an access point to shut down a core, normally. Knoll does, and that leaves him very vulnerable. If I was physically hooked into an access point I might be able to do this as well, or better. But I wouldn't want to take the risk unless there was no other choice to keep humanity in the world.”

“But someone is hooked into the rogue core,” Eirika repeated. “Who on earth would be desperate enough to do that to themselves? Unless, it was someone who had been infected when Grado's core went rogue, and survived, but couldn't get—”

“The tamed core, the one that is maintaining the power and utilities inside the capital city, and all of the smaller tamed cores all the way out to the border, you're saying it's rogue?” Ephraim pushed into the conversation.

Saleh turned his head, hearing a creaking sound. The net around them was bucking and flexing around a seeming bubble of calm encompassing their group. Breathe in. Breathe out. He stood, walking over to Knoll, but not daring to touch him in case it interfered with his concentration. “If it gets to be too much, tell me. I'll get you free.”

“And then I can collapse in front of everyone,” Knoll smiled briefly with his mouth. “I am not overly taxed yet.”

“But you want to be able to deploy the program you wrote to shut down the core, so you have to survive until then, at least.”

Knoll pulled his goggles down around his neck, staring at Saleh. In what little blue and gray light there was, his face was a pale oval slashed though with the line of his mouth, and shadows for eyes, but the whites flashed there for a second. “You know what I did. Myrrh says Lyon is attached to that thing now, because of me. It couldn't be anyone else. And he obviously wasn't able to overcome the replication programming, or any of the major core protocols. For the good of Grado—”

“What on earth do you mean, 'Lyon's attached to that thing now'?” Eirika's brother certainly knew how to let his voice carry for a full audience, and he strode forward.

Saleh stepped in front of him. “Your sister was explaining—”

“She didn't explain that my best friend decided to infect himself to play games with a rogue core on a whim.”

Someone, Saleh thought it came from Kyle's direction, coughed. Over Saleh's shoulder Knoll said, “Oh, that's how you saw it.”

“Saw what? What is going on?”

“Brother,” Eirika began patiently.

“No. What's going on?” there was a note of controlled panic in Ephraim's voice. “I can't move my left arm.”

Light appeared at the edge of Knoll's protective radius. “It's a safety precaution I wanted to take with an automaton here. Cores not recognized by the net out of Grado will be incapable of powering movement. I can do that, at least.”

A young man stepped through the ring of cables holding a white light ball from a chain like an incense burner, swinging it in lazy arcs whenever the shadows of the flattened net threatened unstable footing. A general in-drawing of breath spoke of recognition, but Saleh frowned. It that light waving around the young man looked fuzzy at the edges, insubstantial. He could have been anyone, or even a hologram. Not that Saleh had ever seen one that could handle more than 64 different colors at a time, but with the light designed to wash everything out, would anyone notice a lack of depth?

Still, he cleared his throat, and what little skin was visible above his scarf moved realistically enough. “So, not only Ephraim, who I knew would be dropping by, but Eirika as well,” a soft smile broke over his features. “It's been so long since I've seen or heard from either of you.”

“Lyon, is it true that you've hooked yourself into Grado's rogue core?” Eirika asked, her voice wavering.

“I had to after the wall fell. The net was going wild, and with monsters finally able to move within our borders once more something had to be done. Being able to directly reprogram each core I come in contact with is rather exhilarating, I'll admit, but it's hard work.”

Eirika put a hand to her forehead. “You don't know then? Lyon, the net is spreading out of control and turning machines and humans in its path beyond Grado. I know there is a limit to how much multitasking a human mind can take, but we've got to stop it!”

The young man paused, his large eyes opening guilelessly and giving a glimpse of a tired, younger boy who had spent too much time studying. “I had no idea—”

“Liar.”

Ephraim tried to swing around, though one of his hips did not appear to be willing to co-operate, and he ended up doing more of a pivot. “Don't be so quick to judge! Lyon wouldn't cause undue suffering to anyone, and if he didn't know—”

Knoll was trembling, trying to yank down his frozen right arm. Something like tears were a glistening threat in his eyes, but he locked them on this apparition. “Every core in the net has a geographic point that is sent back to it's originator, which we couldn't block, remember? All that data wouldn't stop being received. You knew the exact moment the net crossed from Grado to Renais. You know which tendrils are in Frelia and you know which tendrils are snaking into the living zone.”

“I admit there has been some chaos. I've had to make very difficult decisions. I have a duty to control the cores within my own border first, but I had not believed—”

“Stop it, Lord Lyon! You're not this person. You love and care about people, where ever they are from.”

“Knoll,” the young man smiled slowly. “You always did notice the best parts of me. To the exclusion of all the rest, I think. I supposed you are right. I have been playing with the truth for a while, now.”

“Does that mean—you knew what would happen in Renais?” Eirika said before stepping back in revulsion. “No! I can't believe it! Lyon, I know it's impossible to remain wholly—human minds don't interface with core directives without extreme reactions, but we will help you Lyon. We will shut down the core and then retreat back to Renais with the refugees and slowly work at reclaiming what was lost, disruptor zone by disruptor zone.”

“And how exactly is this going to help Grado, much less anyone else?” Lyon asked patiently. “Grado is the only place in the world where an infection can be permanently shut down or even removed if it isn't too far advanced. Something Ephraim needs, I will point out. If you shut down the core, those places we have built will no longer be able to perform the wonders that are the staple of our life. And please, Renais could barely sustain itself with Grado's fields and produce providing the same kind of service that the living zone did for Frelia. Are you truly asking me to believe that hundreds of thousands of refugees are going to be able to have a life half as good in backwater Renais as they have here? I control everything within the borders and I am the life blood of the city.”

“You cannot allow the net to expand, or that food shortage you talked about will hit you, too,” Saleh told the young man. “The living zone is threatened, and your efforts at hydroponics within those walls can't replace the kilometers of farm land that has been lost all around us. Your people aren't Jehannites, who know how to gain riches from the desert, and live with its shifting moods. And very soon, control over your own net or not, Grado will turn into that. You're recreating the destruction of demon core, by holding onto your selfish desire for total control over this area.”

Tana sidled closer, whispering, “Saleh, he's not going to listen to reason or blunt truth right now.”

Saleh didn't see why not. Yes, this young man was doing something incredibly risky and from the sounds of the mask that was falling off, he was doing it for vainglorious reasons, but he was young. The young often made painful mistakes and regretted them too late. They could, however, after the mistake was made, could be brought into better reason with the world.

“How much does it hurt, Lyon?” Ephraim asked suddenly. “I've had a seed core, no bigger than a tear drop, I would guess, implanted inside me. All of the new inventive things it's doing to my nerves is agony. Even if the core wired through you is part of an external system like that cable Knoll picked up, aren't you tired?”

“It's the kind of pain a person can withstand with willpower.”

“So is fighting with a broken bone,” Ephraim countered. “That doesn't make it any less worse for you later. It doesn't make you virtuous or strong to withstand pain that you don't have to put yourself through. Just monumentally stubborn and a candidate for Terrible Decision of the Month Club.”

“Are _you_ honestly lecturing _me_ on being stupid?”

“You said it, not me,” Ephraim was smiling as though he'd scored some sort of victory. Saleh thought he saw Knoll's jaw drop, but when he looked, the technician just raised an eyebrow.

Eirika elbowed her way though the group right up to the pale shimmering light. “Ephraim's right about one thing. You have hundreds of other options. Why are you choosing this one?”

“It's not your fault, Eirika for not understanding. Grado's way of life needs to be preserved. There are too many great things here. The science, the medicine—”

“Preserved at the cost of the rest of humanity? It all can be rediscovered Lyon! Believe me! The people I've met in the dead zone, the people hanging on at the margins that anyone at the university would pass by without a thought, they can engineer marvels. Humanity can rebuild. A virus riddled city living on infected power lines is going to die. Maybe not for several decades, but if the rest of the world goes, Saleh is right, Grado falls. And maybe it will be so sickened with that rogue core at its heart that it can't even be remade like Jehanna. Please, listen to me, Lyon. You have never been short sighted.”

The apparition snarled, his face breaking into an angry sneer. “You, sheltered little Eirika with her righteous little dreams so willing to enable Ephraim's irresponsibility for his own happiness, now talk of futures and worlds outside the protection of the disruptor bubble? You want to destroy so you can create something magical and better? Never mind what it will do to me.”

“How can you say that? We're your best friends, Lyon, and I know you're being influenced by the core directives. You might even be enjoying slowly spreading out the net, but that isn't you! Infection theory always says that core programming will try to make allowing the infection to spread feel good for the host. You know if you're hooked into a rogue core it's going to be feeding different signals to your body. You're strong enough to resist that Lyon. I know you are.”

Lyon broke. For a second Saleh thought he saw an expression of intense sorrow, and then the light bright image of Lyon disappeared, and the group was alone in the dark, blinking spots from their eyes. Myrrh stretched her hands toward the sky in relief, and Ephraim stumbled into Kyle's arms.

“Was that a hologram?” Vanessa asked, sounding tired rather than interested in the knowledge. “I'm so glad such technological wonders exist down south.”

Saleh looked at Knoll's pale face. “I have just been given the pass codes for a side door in the capital wall,” Knoll told the rest of the group. “If the cables don't attack when I disconnect, I think it is safe to assume we're being invited in.”

“And if they do attack?” The curious protector with Ephraim asked. “We just plug you back in and wait?”

Knoll's response was exhausted. “Pretty much. Replace 'wait' with 'search out enough slack in the dark, and carefully walk forward.'”

“I'm glad to hear that we have plans,” The protector nodded. “Now, do we have any flashlights? We've been using our night vision on our goggles, but that's military issue.”

“And pilots don't have it. One moment. Tana, did you bring your light?” Vanessa added, before asking, “Who are you three?”

“Oh! Sorry, this is my brother, and these are the protectors that are partnered with him, protector Kyle and protector Forde,” Eirika began.

Saleh smiled as a flash of lighter gray in the dark made him think that Forde waved cheerfully. He certainly asked in good humor: “And who's everyone here?”

While Eirika continued introductions, Saleh directed the disruptor drones high above so that he could inspect Myrrh. She glanced up, her eyebrows moving to approximate fond exasperation, as though to say that she was fine, but not interrupt Eirika's introductions.

Ephraim crouched slowly to Myrrh's level. “May I ask you something, Myrrh? About disconnecting Lyon, I never studied technomancy with any great enthusiasm, but would he need medical help afterward? Technomancers have stabilized cores in specific ares, so it isn't as though the rogue core would have tried to implant any more inside, right? We're about to shut down a lot of infrastructure.”

Myrrh glanced at Knoll, who nodded, as he worked at his arm. Saleh tried to sidle subtly around to help, but the corner of Knoll's mouth lifted in the same wryness Myrrh used when viewing her diagnostic checks. He held out his arm to Saleh, who worked the cable's end spikes from the port. They held their breaths for a moment but the net remained flat.

“He will need medical attention,” Myrrh was saying. “I don't know much about hooking a human into a core, but from my understanding of human bodies, you need more sleep than actively regulating all of the systems that a core has control over would allow. If he has been letting the core stream fluid take place of food and drink he'll be in a lot of trouble.”

“The harness wasn't designed for that,” Knoll said, before sighing. “It's as Eirika says, a core is going to try to create a physical dependance in the person who has been infected. I designed the hook up so that volunteers would only spend a few hours at a time hooked into Grado's net, and maintain the effect of the wall of silence by broadcasting the programs through the seed cores moving through the cables. But it needed twelve technomancers to work in shifts. I don't want to think what might have happened if Lyon thought he could take that on by himself. He might be little more than a cyborg at this point.”

“So,” Tana said after a long pause. “He might not even look as nice as that hologram did while he was yelling at everyone?”

“Hopefully the kind of medical attention he would need would not be like the kind Ephraim was hoping for,” Myrrh said. “He is an important person in Grado, I understand. So he could have gotten new assistants who would keep his infection stable and well monitored.”

“Having gotten rid of his old ones, that isn't likely,” Vanessa pointed out.

“We won't know for sure until we see for ourselves,” Eirika said, offering Ephraim her hand to help him to his feet.

They set off toward the wall around the disruptor zone.


	6. Inside the Disruptor City

Grado's disruptor zone had changed drastically, though it took Ephraim a long time walking down the deserted streets lit by their brilliant neon and grand light displays before he could put a finger on it. There were more plants cascading from balconies than ever, and a new water system made canals and streams out of former sunken roads. Shops, though locked up, were displaying mannequins draped in valuable silk, or new inventions. A screen in a central square was showing the nightly news, and even thought the anchor looked exhausted, she still managed to make the reports sound as mundane as it always did. There were more exhortations to report the infection of loved ones to the nearest hospital than Ephraim remembered from his student days, and a report on an infected blender armature savaging a family would never have been on the news two years ago.

“Where is everyone?” Eirika voiced the question haunting Ephraim. “It's not that late.”

“But it's after sunset,” Forde observed, nodding obliquely to the screen behind then, and then apartments above their heads. “The tape at the bottom is reminding everyone that armatures and infected cyborgs are most active at night, and they should stay inside unless totally necessary. You can see we're being watched.”

Ephraim felt a cold pit open in his stomach as he became aware of the eyes peering dis-trustingly out of blinds. Beside him, Kyle shook his head. “We're going to have to find a way to evacuate the whole city before we shut the core down.”

“It will take us at least a full day to understand how to disentangle Lyon, I am guessing,” Knoll said, glancing over at Eirika. “Maybe you can find the protectors and organize something. We don't want to shut down the core until after we've got Lyon stabilized, if we can help it.”

“What if you can't?” Kyle asked sharply.

“Then we get to return from this journey with the unique experience of being murderers for the greater good,” Knoll replied with entirely too much cheer. Ephraim was beginning to find the technician a bit too much like several of his former teachers for his taste.

Kyle risked a glance at Ephraim, and then continued in silence.

By degrees, and a few wrong turns where streets had completely changed, even since Knoll had lived within the zone, they came to the squat unassuming building of the power station. Ephraim hadn't been inside since a field trip four years ago, but unlike the streets, nothing about it had changed. It looked like a windowless prison, just like every other disruptor zone power station, and since its function was to imprison the disruptor lords within so that they could slave over the functions of the tamed cores, it was a practical use of architectural resources.

“It's locked,” Eirika said in astonishment, looking at the simple, but horribly thick looking, chain and padlock around the handles of the door. “How on earth are we going to get in?”

Myrrh walked up to the door, and studied it for a moment. “The door is steel,” she said after a moment, holding the padlock in her hand. “The soldering on the handles is not.”

She yanked the lock down. Ephraim had anticipated the links pulling apart, but instead there was a snap and a pained scrape, and one handle was hanging with it's bottom angle bent nearly straight.

“Access to the disruptor lord should be free and open, according to Gradoan law, is that not the case?” she asked.

Kyle pushed the door open. Inside, even through the corridor snaking around record offices and spare parts storage, the pervasive green glow of the large core dominated. Eirika and Knoll lead the way, cautiously eying the cables snaking along the walls, but they didn't stir. The air grew close and sticky, smelling of long days indoors and not enough good light.

Soon, Ephraim wished that he was not wearing his armor, as even light leather was too much, and Saleh unclipped his cloak, folding it and tying it around his waist, just under the belt that housed a variety of tools. Knoll and Eirika seemed to be immune to the atmosphere, pressing on ahead until they swung open the doors to the main room.

Ephraim had expected a grisly display of Lyon's body hanging from the ceiling, gently rotating like a corpse on a gibbet. Instead, the bright green glow of the massive full story core cast hard edged shadows and made creeping spiders out of abandoned rolling chairs. The living system of finger thick cables attached to the base and top of this sludgy crystal made it look like a heart, and after a few moments of staring, Ephraim thought it might even be beating.

“Where's Ly—oh.”

Tana gasped softly over his shoulder.

The core dominated the room, making the banks of computers at it's base seem insignificant, but amid the gentle whirring and beeping, Someone had brought in an armchair and a veritable phalanx of those thin tendrils ran from the core to make some kind of braided throne over the back and overstuffed arms, shining green and metallic black. It was almost impossible to distinguish the small figure trapped in the center, for the cables had speared the naked arms above and below, spreading them out like a view of the horizon only bisected by a pale body wearing black wherever the cables weren't attached to his sides or legs. The face looked more like a skull, but the eyes glittered, fixing on Ephraim's horror.

The group paused in the doorway, teetering on the brink of running. Saleh strode forward, his face impassive, and the half cloak half skirt billowing as he chose a console, without too long a glance at the disruptor lord bound to the core. “Hmm, water pressure in the canal system. Will you allow me to look at your physical scans?”

“Just disconnect me. You know you can't shut down the core until you do. It's quite easy, if a little time consuming with all of the junction ports.”

“Destroying yourself to ensure the life of others is how the world will continue to turn,” Saleh replied, beginning to type in some queries. “Destroying yourself to ensure the torment of another soul, however, is an act of ultimate selfishness. Myrrh, do you have any idea how we can get in here?”

“I can try a few things, but this is what Eirika has trained for—”

When the small robot stepped forward Ephraim turned around and walked out. He was not running from the situation. He was not. His skills were simply useless in that living tomb of machine veins and blood. He made it all the way to the door and fresh air before his brain caught up with his legs and rooted him to the spot calling him a coward and a traitor. It had been so easy outside the walls trading insults like old friends.

Behind him, Kyle coughed. “Sir.”

“I wish I knew what I was doing here, Kyle,” Ephraim said slowly. “I thought we'd get into the disruptor zone, and I'd get this infection removed, and then Lyon and I and anyone else we could scrounge up would figure out what to do, and we'd do it. It might be long and difficult, but we would get it done, together. I don't—I can't begin to understand what happened. What did I do, what did Eirika do, to get this reaction from him?”

“Your sister says what he has done to himself would change his personality—” Kyle began, but Ephraim shook his head.

“You don't understand Lyon. Everything he said, he. He has a tone to his voice when he's being absolutely honest. It's just like he said to that technician. He's, I don't know, you haven't lived in this place. It's—he has all of the bad aspects of this zone inside him, buried under the kindness, and I've always known that, but when I last saw him, his better angels were at the forefront of his thoughts. Two years shouldn't change this much.”

They looked out on the shining city, sparkling in defiance of the world. At last Kyle said: “There is nothing I can say to make it better.”

“Well, I've never trusted words over actions, anyhow,” Ephraim shrugged. It felt as though his sternum was going to crack from the pressure. His whole head was wooly, wrapped in some sort of itchy gauze, and at any moment it might come off, but he knew pain would accompany that unwrapping. He was shoulder to shoulder with Kyle, and the fresh air outside made him want to know if Kyle felt as though the power station was a tomb. “Let's see if we can find the protectors. There should be a radio room somewhere in this mausoleum.”

The smile Kyle gave him when Ephraim clapped him on the shoulder was one of warm pride. Confront one problem face first at a time, and right now his problem was getting the people out of the disruptor city.

“I think I saw radio equipment in the second room on the left,” Kyle said, before adding, in a very serious way, “we could call it the radivication room, to match the deathly theme—”

“No,” Ephraim looked to the left, before adding as an after thought. “Definitely not. And I forbid you from attempting puns.”

“Forde's a better at it,” Kyle agreed. “I think I sprained something.”

“Yeah, _my_ sense of humor.”

By the time dawn came they had managed only to get in contact with a very junior grade trainee who had been put in charge of manning the protector's station by the normal gate. Kyle had talked her through the basic explanation they had concocted, and trainee level protector Amelia had said that she would notify her commanding officer as soon as he got back, but there had been a report of looting in the plaza, so she would call back in four hours whether or not there was news.

“It was so much simpler when I was a student,” Ephraim sighed, yawning as he rose from the seat Kyle had made him take when the pacing as they tried frequency after frequency and got no response. “I'd just sneak out of the dorm room without waking Eirika and go over to Head protector Duessel's house. He made the best crepes after a training round. Thin and crispy with salmon.”

“Stop. Our last meal was what, nutrition cubes nine hours ago? Have you any idea how we're going to organize enough food for a week long march with thousands of refugees?” Kyle asked.

“I've been thinking about it, actually,” Vanessa said from the wall opposite the doors to the main room. She had been standing, looking blankly at a sheet of paper which said at the top: 'Report Accomplishments, Findings, and Set Backs of the Day' but had nothing underneath it. “If we get the beginning of this exodus organized today, Tana and I can radio Renais, and they can radio Frelia. There has to be tons of food in the city. If we can get it out by plane before the armatures come scavenging for soft squishy things to machine-ify, we could keep everyone fed on the fly, as it were, before they reach Renais.”

Ephraim elbowed Kyle. “See, that's how you make a pun. So, the airlift idea might work, and even if we can't get Frelia to help, there's always Grado's air force.”

“Most of the ones we encountered were busy around the countryside,” Vanessa countered. “You know it's not like Renais where protectors work both city and country. There are aspects of life a well run military can't be involved in. However, see what you can find when you get in contact with the protectors. Anything that flies would be welcome. I'll try to get this report together, and see what I can dig up,” she peered at both Kyle and Ephraim. “You might want to take the cue from your other friend and look into getting some sleep before you try to explain things.”

“Don't worry, we have a version of events that probably will not sound as though the end of times is upon us all,” Kyle assured her.

“No, it's just the end for Grado. Which, considering the audience, isn't likely to quell the panic.”

“I trained with a lot of the younger protectors here,” Ephraim protested, yawning again. “They're good people. Solid.”

“Yes, but it's their commanders you need to contact,” Vanessa was, Ephraim was beginning to suspect a little too practical.

He knew if this was any other situation he would want the plain reality laid out before him, but he had to face Lyon soon, and make sure Eirika was alright after a night spent facing the worst possibility for a disruptor lord. His dismay must have shown, because the captain smiled. “I have orders from Lord Innes to give the exact same advice to the disruptor lord of Renais that he would. Admittedly I know he was only thinking of Lady Eirika at the time, but consider my buckets of cold water the best that I can give, when I do not possess my lord's tactical genius.”

Ah. Oddly reassuring to know that Innes could be a stubborn jerk determined to make Ephraim's day worse from hundreds of kilometers away. Ephraim had a sudden vision of the younger disruptor lord of Frelia meeting Lyon socially and felt a bit queasy.

“Well, thanks for that,” he said wryly, heading into the main room.

Forde had unrolled sleeping bags and kits, and promptly curled up in his. Eirika sat on hers, while Tana rubbed her shoulders. In the harsh light it was hard to tell, but the droopiness of his sister's posture suggested exhaustion. Ephraim ignored the ghoul still enthroned and walked over to her.

“How are you doing?”

Eirika's first response was a lie. “Fine. I found some stuff to tell us how deeply Lyon is hooked in. He wants to help, but the machine's programming is so deep inside him now—I think he stopped caring when his father died, and you need to maintain constant vigilance with an active infection.”

Vigarde was dead? Ephraim looked around the room wildly, as though the old man would jump out from behind a conduit or one of the massive computer towers and say that it was all a misunderstanding.

Eirika immediate regretted having said what she had. “Oh, no. Ephraim, I'm so sorry. I forgot. I meant to break it to you gently. Knoll said he got infected when the wall fell. You know how he felt about doing his duty. He didn't even get treatment, apparently. Just left the power station and walked out of the city and into the plains. Lyon ordered the protectors to retrieve him, but—he had turned already. That night, is, I think, if I'm understanding the logs properly, the first time Lyon decided to test out the system that the scientists down here had built. He wasn't in a state to take the care that he would need.”

She trailed off, breathing in shakily.

Ephraim stared at his knees. “He was the only engineer in Grado who didn't laugh at me when I said that I wanted to be a protector.”

It didn't feel like a fitting epitaph for someone he had felt closer to than his own father, in many ways. He reached for Eirika's hand. He wanted to say something grand and inspiring. Vigarde deserved that much. But Ephraim was not a good speeches and words person. He was just miserable, and a part that thought about these things was furious that a disruptor lord as good as Vigarde had chosen to walk into the wasteland like the old Jehannite Kings rather than bring an infection back to the core that had made it. It wasn't as though that thing Lyon thought he could control was going to go even further rogue.

So many people had been counting on him, and he walked away. For the good of all, and the good of no one.

“I'm going to get some rest,” Eirika said at last, and they let go. “We still don't know how much damage has been done, but once you're finished speaking with the protectors, we need to get a healer in here. Knoll and Saleh will be able to do what they can, but from what I saw most of his muscles have cables growing through them. It's much deeper than yo—than Knoll's arm.”

Ephraim frowned, and Tana came to a halt on Eirika's shoulders. She fixed him with a long look. “Okay. I guess I have to be the one to ask, since everyone's been dropping dark hints about it, but no one will say anything outright. Ephraim, did you get infected?”

“Yes. It has been stabilized, though,” that drooping expression on Tana's face made Ephraim want to make it sounds as positive and upbeat as possible, but it was always hard to lie, particularly when he knew Eirika would want the truth as well as probably knowing more about what was going on than he did. “Not fully stabilized, really, it's still trying to grow, but, well, I can still get it fixed, even if it turns out that I can't remove it.”

Eirika shut her eyes. Tana made a small noise like she wanted to cry, but thought that it might make everything worse. “I'm _so_ sorry, Ephraim.”

“Don't be. I wasn't being careful, and now I'm paying for it,” like Lyon. “But this isn't the end. And many people live quite normally after an infection, if it's shut down in time, and not reactivated.”

Tana's small noise was louder. “I'm sorry for both of you. I'm glad you've got a positive attitude about this Ephraim, and Eirika, you know if I got infected my brother would probably haul me into the dead zone and shoot me like the old days.”

“I'm sure Innes wouldn't do that,” Eirika put a hand on the one resting on her shoulder. “Make the piece of ground where it happened uninhabitable for a century or two, perhaps. But I really think he is just being Innes when he scolds you.”

“He's a universal constant,” Ephraim agreed, making Eirika smother laughter with her hands.

She shook her head at him. “You should get some rest, too.”

“I've got a conversation I think I owe Lyon,” on stiff joints, with muscles feeling like lead, Ephraim rose. “I'll tuck you in when I get back and nap a bit myself, happy you two? Hopefully Kyle will wake me up before Amelia finds her commanding officer.”

From Forde's corner there came a mumbled exhortation not to involve Kyle in any waking activities, but since Forde had carried on whole conversations in his sleep before, Ephraim ignored it. The few meters to that concession to comfort while masquerading as a throne were slow going. He meant to stride over there, in command of the situation, but sunken eyes popped open and watched the approach, judging it, and Lyon's face looked as though the slow nasty grin might split it.

Ephraim breathed in, and wished he hadn't. The crypt smell of not enough fresh air was much stronger here. “What do you want to tell me, Lyon? I'm listening.”

“Are you indeed?” The voice was the same one the hologram had used at least. “How novel of you.”

He was just toying with Ephraim, and they both knew it. Ephraim leaned in. “Eirika believes that core has taken away your ability make choices on our own. But I know what you sound like when you're being honest. Tell me what I did wrong.”

“It's always about you, isn't it? You're listening, when you're really not; you did wrong, when you're really so insignificant,” the smile slid from parchment thin cheeks, but his eyes still glittered as though Lyon was fighting through a fever dream. “It never crossed your mind that I could be creating order here?”

“Eirika says that would be impossible.”

“Your lovely sister is competent in her subject matter, but she wouldn't know how to deal with an idea not fed to her by her teachers,” Lyon spat. “I've had plans to do this ever since I read accounts of the original core research before Lagdou turned into what we laughably call 'demon,' and then you came along making everyone so pleased with you without even trying, and turning on the charm to get out of the chores that society needed of you, never mind what you broke along the way. They kept calling you an original with your brave and noble purpose of going into the dead zone and having adventures. You planned to abandon the place your father set for you, the place Renais needed you to fill. You're leaving Eirika as the only person trained to handle a core malfunction. You self indulgent coward.

“I'm serving my people. I've kept them safe. Even now the monsters roaming Grado get the cables attacking them if they get near any one, despite all this distraction going on around me. What did you do? Have adventures?”

Ephraim looked down. “Yes. And then I found the answer to my questions.”

“Like what you found?” Lyon barely managed to move a hand, indicating the skeletal remains with a wiggle of fingertips. “Come on and save me, Ephraim, do.”

“I can't, Lyon,” he thought about the infected disruptor lord, walking into the wasteland. He thought about Eirika, almost at home in this madness. He thought about what that strange man Saleh had said. A selfish desire to ruin those left behind. “You're the only one who can help yourself now.”

“Harsh, but to be expected of you, so self righteous—”

“No. You made a dangerous decision, while knowing the dangers, or at least certainly finding out about them soon enough. You made the choice when we came to confront you with the effects of that decision to try to attack us, and crush Myrrh. You made the choice to insult and belittle Eirika when she offered several solutions. You didn't come up to me and say 'my friend' you didn't come up to Knoll and apologize for exiling him while staying here to use what he helped build. You made all those choices. We will get you out of that contraption, and get you on your feet but you're the only one who can stop making those choices.”

Eyelids dropped over eyes, and Lyon sunk back into the embrace of the cables and tendrils letting the chair consume him. “If you had come to me alone this afternoon, the way you were supposed to, I would have said 'my friend,' and aided you in every way.”

The sigh was so quiet Ephraim wasn't sure that he had heard it rightly, but if he had, he didn't understand what Lyon meant by it.

“Ah hah,” Knoll said from a monitor. “Got it.”

Lyon's eyes opened again, shining green in the highlighted shadows. He groaned. “You're too much of a distraction. Leave me alone, Ephraim.”

Ephraim didn't get much sleep. His conversation with protector Amelia was short, but she brought Duessel of all people to the radio booth, giving Ephraim something like hope. After the carefully scripted version of events Kyle had developed for Amelia, Ephraim spoke freely with relish. Within five minutes, Duessel suggested a meeting. The seriousness in his voice was like solid ground under Ephraim's feet. They had a plan. They were moving forward. He couldn't be happier.

He, Kyle and Forde left the power station and went to meet Duessel and that junior protector, who it turned out was much younger than the rest and trying to look worthy of her slightly too large leather armor, and slightly too long disruptor staff, at a restaurant. No one talked about the food shortage reducing the menu to split pea soup. There was some general talk of Vanessa's airlift plan, which Duessel was hesitant about.

“The wyvern pilots have been busy. I'm not sure we could recall them to begin the airlift in time. General Glen was infected early on last year, and he's the one who would normally co-ordinate protection for far flung people, and the airlift. I don't know if he's even alive any more,” Duessel rubbed his temples. “I wish this wasn't as convincing a picture as you have painted it. It would be so much easier to slide into a complacent desire for day to day survival.”

Ephraim frowned, “It's a large job, but we have to—”

“I was merely voicing a wish. In hopeless situations, there is no reason not to imagine something more hopeful. It might shake a better plan loose. We can empty the disruptor city. It will just be difficult not to cause panic.”

“I think an announcement on the news would best,” Kyle jumped in. It was one of his passions, though Ephraim wondered if it was entirely a good idea to give Kyle control over a whole broadcasting system. They didn't have anything more than the radio in Renais. He wasn't sure if Kyle knew the power a television had. “Nothing alarming. Just an announcement that district heads are to meet with the head protectors of the region, given the fluctuations of the core since the wall came down. You're only giving people knowledge they have already. Then at the meetings the protectors discuss the core situation and bring the heads around to the idea of evacuation. The next night there will be more announcements all about the organization, how orderly people need to be, and keep people broken down by the neighborhood level. You don't want too many people to be gathered to turn into a mob, and panicking can get shouted down by the more confident.”

This plan was heavily criticized by Duessel for several reasons, but mostly because Kyle had no idea the numbers of people that they were trying to move. Getting people out neighborhoods at a time, was the best, but when they thought monsters were beyond the walls, you couldn't remove people from their homes with crowbars. The looting in the city was bad enough without a mass panic that news that the core was being shut down, and an uncontrolled evacuation would cause.

“Not that this isn't really cynical,” Forde said, as he continued to eat the soup Kyle had put aside, “but Lyon said he was using the net to attack monsters. So, we could find out where the monsters are at least before the whole group sets out, couldn't we? I know it's not like he's giving anyone the information they need, but he's still human enough to be distracted, and then all the tech wizards find out whatever.

“Anyway, if we shut down the core, all the cables that spawned from it won't be functional. So why don't you all say something about the great advantage of not getting attacked by the cables when outside the disruptor? Plus you know where the monsters are thanks to the dedicated work of the team, or what have you. It's the truth, and you're just making it clear that it isn't any more dangerous to move outside the city than it is within it. Heck, with the heat we've had this summer it's even going to seem safer to go after dark than it is in here. After a few half nights of marches and not getting attacked, it's going to seem boring by comparison.”

“It's a plan. You say that Lyon hasn't been helping, at all?” Duessel tapped the ceramic rim of his bowl with the spoon thoughtfully.

Ephraim shrugged uncomfortably. “Well, he just sort of sits there, and lets them work around him like a statue. If I understood it, however, he's feeding wrong information into the monitors the tech people are working from. When he's distracted, they can find information they need stored in the computers, and Saleh and Knoll can do things to find the right information even when he's only feeding things like water density onto the monitors. Eirika tried to explain it this morning, but I still don't get how the monitors and computers are not the same thing, so don't look at me.”

“Hmm. When he asked us to shut him in there I was worried,” Duessel trailed off. “I think I had better go see him. Where are you going after this?”

“We need to find a doctor with more experience in infection stabilization than we have right now,” Ephraim said, feeling both Fore and Kyle's gazes on the back of his neck.

He wanted to kick them under the table, but Forde would just make a scene of injured innocence, and Kyle would proceed to be very self righteously unreassured that Ephraim was going to have his own infection looked after as well.

In a surprising moment of the world being a very small place, they ran across the doctor who had first given Ephraim the implants out in the dead zone. She was working with the refugees, but when she saw Ephraim, she came over to ask how he was managing. This led to an appointment for the next day, and Ephraim tentatively asking if she could see another patient. When he mentioned that this patient was outside the hospital the woman frowned, and then asked a passing nurse what her shift schedule was for house bound infections.

“I only have three hours,” she said when she came back. “Not many of us want to be wandering the streets, particularly after dark. I try to see as many house bound people as I can, but deaths are happening more frequently. To give your friend the time they might need, I must hope that the rest of my house calls go quickly.”

Ephraim wished he had a copy of that diagram Saleh had been pouring over from the mysterious file. Perhaps if she could see the severity of the situation she would find someone else here to take on her other patients.

Still, he nodded, “We have to get back. Forde, can you accompany Doctor Natasha, and show her the way when she's done with her visits?”

“Better let Amelia handle that,” Duessel said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but Forde might get lost, and it has been years since you were last here, Ephraim.”

They went their separate ways: the doctor to her house calls, and the rest of the group back to the power station. Duessel was not a welcome surprise for Lyon. Eirika rushed in, trying to explain that it wasn't really Lyon doing the talking. Ephraim wondered if it was possible for it to be both the manipulations of the outside force of the core, and Lyon's true feelings coming out. This kind of question was what Forde usually suggested and never answered.

But there had been true feelings on the day of an picnic taken instead of studying for exams, lying on the grass and making pictures from clouds. He remembered waking up from a nap with Lyon's hand in his own.

A real camp was beginning to form around the sleeping bags. Ephraim went to sit down while Eirika and Duessel tried to get some normalcy out of Lyon. It was exhausting listening to them and wondering what could be done to fix what had been broken beyond repair, and whether Vanessa's plans met with approval, and how Renais was going to handle the sudden influx of people within a few weeks.

The doctor's arrival only made things worse. He fell asleep on his sleeping bag to the sounds of disagreement about “muscle tissue” and “shut off switches with manual decoupling” and “toxic shock.” He wasn't surprised by the nightmare he had. At one point he woke up sweating sure he was saying something, and someone was telling him to go back to sleep, given the surgery that would be happening tomorrow.

He wanted water and fresh air. He heard Lyon chuckle as he stumbled into the corridor. What if that monstrous green thing let Lyon know his dreams?

Kyle found him leaning on the side of the power station, looking at the bright blue sky. Not even bothering to look up, Ephraim accepted the water bottle in Kyle's hand. “We have got to stop meeting like this.”

“It has disadvantages,” Kyle sat down next to Ephraim. “Though, you're sitting right under the 'hazardous materials' sign.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“These meetings might have disadvantages, but I get a bit of a laugh,” Kyle wasn't even smiling.

Ephraim leaned his head against Kyle's shoulder. “I've told you to stop trying to be funny. You're not built for it.”

“If it helps, I could try to find Tana or Forde, instead.”

“No, it's fine. I just need something that I could actually do. If this was a fight, if there was something to be won here—but it's all just numbers and computer math. I feel useless.”

“We have to get everyone out of here safely, and you'll be needed on the road,” Kyle offered. “I know it's hard. Everyone thinks being a protector gives you so much power over people's lives. It's all action and excitement. But the truth of the matter is that whatever we do, its in response to the disruptor lords. They tell us where to go, whom to protect. It's not an adventure. Just work.”

Kyle was solid against him, voice rising and falling with inflections that Ephraim knew he used on new recruits. “You don't think I'm going to take this experience and go back and study and learn all the things that I was supposed to when I was goofing off, do you?”

“You could. It might be beneficial to Renais,” Kyle told him. “But we have two disruptor lords right now, while you are good at fighting, and making those nasty decisions about falling back to safe ground, or going further in. If you choose to become Eirika's head protector, that gives someone a chance to come in from the outside to assist her with the core when your father is gone. That's not a bad thing.”

Kyle's arm wrapped around his back and rested on his shoulder. Ephraim snaked his own arm around Kyle's waist, looking up at the bright yellow aluminum drilled in overhead before Kyle could think too much about it and protest. “We're really under the 'hazardous materials' sign? I wish Forde could take a picture.”

When they went back to the main camp, and Ephraim was told by the white clad Doctor Natasha that it was best if he tried to sleep for as long as possible, he and Kyle both obeyed the orders with a minimum of fuss, lying down together.

The operation took less time than he thought, but they had knocked him out for it, and Ephraim was less than pleased when the hospital told him that he would need to rest and relax and do nothing strenuous for the next three months. It was not an option. On the bright side, as Forde said, as they were heading back to the station, the new chromed network of raised wires radiating from his spine looked really interesting, particularly where they coincided with the small black patch and the three green leaking ports.

Natasha shook her head. “They won't feel good as you age. It's too bad. I had hoped when we first met that a full removal would work once you got to the disruptor city. But even if we weren't going to be losing that operating bay, that infection went too deep. A lot of your bone structure has been compromised. Usually we're luckier, and the infection goes after the largest organ, your skin, first. But it never got serious control of your nervous system, so that's something.”

She was thinking about her other patient.

In a week, they had a program to take control of the net written, and began disconnecting the cables. Eirika and Knoll were hollow eyed, going through the computer system regardless of the screams, and retreating from the camp with furtive looks and some old text books that Duessel had found for them when they should have been sleeping. It was like exams week, only Ephraim didn't have anywhere to run to this time, and despite better judgment warning him not to, he spent most of his free time trying to talk to Lyon.

When a massive cable imbedded in a fist thick port between his shoulder blades was disconnected, Lyon actually fainted. It was a shock seeing him crumple like a crushed tin can, eyes rolled back in his head. Ephraim realized this was the first time Lyon had been unconscious since their arrival.

Natasha shooed him away at that point, saying that Saleh and she hand to handle the rest _right now_. He had never been kicked out of a place with such urgency so nicely.

Kyle was at an actual radio station, working on that night's broadcast with the TV people. Time, which had slowed to a crawl as soon as they entered the disruptor city was now speeding up, Ephraim realized. There weren't that many more days left.

He found Eirika zonked out over one of her textbooks in the radio room of the power station. Tana was standing over her with a militant expression, and a pillow that she seemed to be trying to substitute without waking her. She pointed firmly at the door and Ephraim back right out into the hallway, hands in the air. Tana followed, shutting the door behind her.

“No, she's going to sleep. I've chased out Knoll, Myrrh, _and_ Vanessa. You can go join them, too.”

On the steps of the power station, Vanessa was sitting very still while Myrrh brushed out the stiff braid that she usually wore.

“No, I find it soothing,” Myrrh said flatly as Ephraim approached. “It is a very difficult task, manipulating fingers delicately. It makes me pleased to do something that requires physical care and consideration. That is why I like to wrap my hair in ribbons. It is difficult and can be considered a measure of success.”

“These small things in life are quite amazing, really,” Vanessa leaned back. “Still, thank you for taking the time.”

Ephraim wandered past them, seeing the path back to the center of the city. If he walked far enough away, would it get better? Hardly. He really needed to get used to waiting, and knowing that there were some times when he really was superfluous.

A shadow huddled in the lee of the wrought iron fence revealed Knoll, looking small and shabby in the sunlight. He was not zonked out, but only just, another book balanced on his raised knees while he rested his chin on it, staring off into the distance. Ephraim couldn't ask how it was going. He knew the answer to that.

“Is he dead?” Knoll asked, looking up and giving Ephraim a view of bloodshot eyes and a puffy redness that came from crying.

“No. Fainted.”

“Good,” and he looked relived that the man who had done nothing but ridicule and ignore his efforts was still alive.

A revelation struck Ephraim full in the stomach. “You loved him.”

Knoll had a way of using his long distance stare to wither a person without saying anything. Ephraim felt guilty, as though he should have know this years ago, and it was only his own self interest that kept him from seeing it, despite never having known Knoll. But the stare broke at last and a soft expression wore down the cracked and shattered edges. “I still do. That won't change. Sadly, the person has, and I don't think I can love him.”

Ephraim scowled. “I wish everyone would stop acting as though as soon as he is taken off that core he'll go back to the way he was. As though this isn't—”

“I didn't say that. I just said that he had changed,” Knoll sighed, and dropped his cheek into his book again. “I'm sorry. I'm too tired to have this conversation with you of all people.”

“You don't like me.”

“I think you're probably a decent person,” when Knoll shrugged, his angular shoulders made him look like a vulture. “You'll do the right thing, whatever the cost. Lyon always wanted to watch you fall doing that.”

“And what about you?” Ephraim didn't want to know what Lyon thought of him.

Knoll however, thought that the question was not about Ephraim at all. “I'm very poor, luckily. There gets to be a point where you stop thinking about what you might lose, because there is nothing left. It's not like being brave and selfless. It's just knowing that there are some things that can only be accomplished when you're willing to do them.”

It took more effort than it should have not to roll his eyes and mutter 'philosophy students.' Being back in Grado pulled him back to the old days too often. Ephraim breathed out, “You sound like Saleh.”

“Being around people can make them rub off on you a bit,” Knoll agreed. “But, there are worse people to emulate. Maybe I could choose someone less awkward, but—you never have to explain the difficult things, except in your own time. Strange trait in a teacher, I suppose, but I'd like to be that kind of person.”

“He's a teacher? I never knew that. I thought his job was taking care of Myrrh.”

Knoll shrugged. “She takes care of herself fairly well. And how do you think the living zone manages to keep it's knowledge intact? It's generally a bad thing if you only have one skill or specialization.”

Like only being able to hit a monster with a staff instead of being able to hit a monster with a staff and also know when to admit that you were outmatched and run away. “I can understand that,” Ephraim rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the thin ridge of the highest reaching wire. “May I ask you something about your arm?”

“I'll try to answer,” Knoll agreed. “But I'm coming around to the opinion that the more this art dies, the better off the world will be, so don't ask me to tell you how to make it remotely safe for you to use those ports in you to tap into the net.”

“Hellfires, no. I'd look ridiculous hiking up my shirt and armor any time I wanted to try battling monsters that way,” Ephraim got a soft bark of laughter from that one. “Plus, I don't need anything to slow me down. I just wanted to know how long I can reasonably expect to last.”

Knoll lifted on corner of his mouth in a smile that didn't reach his red eyes. “Technomancers stop asking that kind of question after a while. I suggest you concentrate on living long enough so that it becomes pointless. If you like, you could pass too close to a magnet or the weather could shift, or you could get toss around just too much, tomorrow, and that infection will reactivate. Think about it that way if it makes you feel any better.”

“So, live every day as though it's my last?”

“That's usually what your type likes to do anyway, isn't it?” The words were sly, but the edge was missing from his tones, and that soft expression was managing to even soothe away some of the puffy blotches from his tears. “Besides, if Eirika and I get the core shut down wrong, the entire net locked into this core will detonate, so your next day really might be your last.”

Keeping a careful arm length between them, Ephraim sat down with his back to the fence. “Go to sleep, then. I'll keep watch to the next day, if you need it.”

By the time all of the book pillows and sleepless nights were to come to fruition, the city was almost empty. Ephraim herded the last set of neighbors to the temporary camp outside the city gate in the morning, and then walked with Kyle and Forde back to the power station. Lyon wasn't dead, yet. He was with the other bed bound patients taken from the city hospitals in stretchers and on gurneys. Doctor Natasha had her eye on him.

Ephraim had wondered if she would have been so careful if she had known what Lyon was responsible for doing. He had voiced this concern out loud over breakfast in the main room, earning a glare from Duessel at the suggestion that a Gradoan doctor wouldn't take care of her patient (at least Ephraim guessed that was what the glare was for). Knoll looked up from his tin of bland soup base, and said, casually that one of the teaching doctors at the hospital she worked at had been exiled in a similar manner to Knoll. He just obviously hadn't made it as far as a safe haven. Chances were that the doctor knew.

Turning off the rogue core should have been a big accomplishment. Instead, Knoll picked up one of the cables from the floor, put it into his arm, and nodded at Eirika who began typing away at her computer terminal. He heard all of the fans stop whirring just as Eirika stopped typing, but that was it. The green light faded, dimming out of the core by degrees. Saleh helped Knoll pull the plug from his arm.

They left, while there was still some light in the power station. Their gear was packed up already, and waiting in the camp. Forde pulled open the doors on an empty city. Ephraim could still hear the flow of moving water on the breeze, but no lights twinkled weakly in the daylight, no music floated from radios. They were standing in a body, Ephraim realized, that had finally been allowed to die.

Maybe that was why there had only ever been one wall of silence. The rest of the disruptor cities knew better.

Talk of the nervous stilted variety flowed behind them. Vanessa said she and Tana still had a collection for the airlift to pick up. Eirika and Tana said their good byes, which seemed strange, since they would be seeing each other in another three hours, four, tops. Forde was busy teasing Kyle about something and from the constant glances in his direction, Ephraim was sure that he did not want to join in. Saleh mentioned that he was pleased that meeting these people and working to build something greater meant that he would be able to bring Knoll back to Caer Pelyn without the use of an urn, or something similar. Knoll finally laughed outright, his face losing that pinched, starved look the days and nights had worn into him. He sounded a little surprised to Ephraim's ears when he said that he was glad, too.

Myrrh skipped down the steps, spreading out the articulated joints of her fingers. “I am glad to be going home,” she said to no one in particular.

“I am, too,” Ephraim told her, bringing a smile to her face that must have had more force of feeling behind it than Forde's celebratory whoop.

The party set off through the city, beginning the return journey.


End file.
